History of the Missouri Paleozoic. — Broddhead. 387 
have found an occasional plant fragment, showing that there 
may have been a few Carboniferous islands supporting a lyco- 
podiaceous growth. But there is no coal of Carboniferous age 
west of the plains. Around the margin of the lower Coal 
Measures, where they rest upon rocks of older terranes, are 
found isolated coal deposits consisting, for the most part, of 
an impure cannel or bituminous coal. Their thickness may 
be a few feet or may be 20 or 50 feet, or even more ; their in- 
clination to the horizon would indicate that they were formed 
when the adjacent strata were considerably disturbed, or that 
a disturbance occurred soon after the coal was laid down. 
These beds are now often found in side valleys tributary to 
larger valleys ; and the rocks higher in the hills as well as 
those on which the coal rests are of older age than the coal it- 
self. In fact thej r rarely extend farther than 200 feet into the 
adjoining hill. In northeastern Missouri they lie on and 
against the Lower Carboniferous; in Cole, Moniteau and 
Morgan counties they rest on beds of the Ozark series, and in 
no instance have I observed them occupying eroded valleys of 
Upper Carboniferous age. They must have been formed just 
at the dawn of the Upper Carboniferous when there was an 
unsettled condition existing, and when oscillations and tilting 
of strata prevented a continuous coal formation; or in other 
words the first coals were laid down in small disconnected 
basins.* 
We have thus far traced the geological history of each ter- 
rane. We would now consider briefly the subsequent frac- 
ture, erosion and carrying awaj r of the material so as to pre- 
pare our field for man's habitation. 
At the close of the Paleozoic the Appalachian revolution 
took place; the coal and other interstratified beds from Penn- 
sylvania and southwestward to Alabama were crushed up, 
folded, and raised 4,000 or 5,000 feet; and the bituminous 
coal of eastern Pennsylvania was changed to anthracite At 
the same time there was a slight quaquaversal optimist of 
the Ozarks and of the later strata, as shown by occasional 
*Both zinc and lead ores have been found with the coal in these 
••pockets,'" evidently deposited since the coal was laiddpwn; and it may 
l)i ■ thai the lead and zinc Ores of Central and SOUl Invest cm M issouri were 
all deposited since the laj ing down of the coal. 
