Formation of Coal. 
199 
was far away to the east. A region of unbroken 
monotony stretched from the granite mountains about 
Moruya to the sandstone hills of Mount Lambic, and 
north from there to Stroud — a wild waste of marsh 
land, where countless generations of plants and trees 
lived and died, each contributing something to the 
growing organic debris that provides the material for 
the making of coal. 
Even at the present time we may find somewhat 
similar peat-mosses. A morass as long as England 
extends along the course of the Prepit, an affluent of 
the Dnieper. A swamp extends from Norfolk in 
Virginia into North Carolina. The whole tract, forty 
miles in length, and twenty-five broad, is covered with 
water-plants, reeds, and trees. The soil is a mass of 
grasses, roots, stems, and leaves. Mosses and ferns 
flourish. The place is appropriately named the Great 
Dismal Swamp. But all the conditions are there for 
the beginnings of a bed of coal. If by a gentle sub- 
sidence of that part of the earth's crust the Dismal 
Swamp was lowered, and sediments brought down by 
rivers from the high lands around, the layer of vege- 
table matter would be buried below some thousands of 
feet of newer rocks, and would in time be converted 
into coal. This is just what happened here in Permo- 
Carboniferous times. The land was slowly subsiding, 
and the great Australian morass, with its rich carbona- 
ceous deposits and its waving surface of richest 
green, was depressed beneath the waters of a great 
inland lake. Sediments were swept down by broad 
