COAL SYSTEM. 
295 
CHAPTER V. 
COAL SYSTEM. 
The coal formation can scarcely be said to be found in the First Geological District, or even 
within the State of New-York. The lowest beds only, the conglomerate and coarse grits 
underlying the coal beds, and forming the base of the coal formation, are found in small patches 
as outliers, on the summits of some of the high peaks of the Catskill mountains. 
Although only the lowest rock of the coal formation is deposited within the boundary of the 
State of New-York, the most magnificent development of the coal formation known in the 
world is found on her borders ; and the deposition of this, and all the rocks in the descending 
series down to the primary, seem due to the action of the same general cause as that to which 
we have ascribed the quaternary, and other systems of strata down to the coal formation, 
namely, to the action of the equatorial and polar currents. The directions of chains of pri¬ 
mary rocks under the equator, and along the western, northern and eastern parts of the Ame¬ 
rican continent, seem to have determined the direction of the equatorial current, and caused 
it to perform a circuit around from Mexico along the Rocky mountains, a part flowing into 
the Polar sea and Hudson’s bay, and the remainder through the northern part of the United 
States and southern part of Canada, where it was again subdivided, one part flowing over and 
through the St. Lawrence valley, and the remainder over the Mohawk valley, and along the 
Blue ridge around to the Mississippi, where it would rejoin the same stream ; the polar cur¬ 
rent through the St. Lawrence and Hudson valleys, and the valley of the Red river of the 
North and the Mississippi, tending to aid in the production of this circular flow. The meeting 
of these currents at particular points where they would necessarily be brought to conflict with 
each other’s directions, and the forms of elevated tracts within this area, would tend to the 
production of eddies on a large scale, where floating bodies would be kept within certain areas 
for long periods, until, if of vegetable origin, they would become waterlogged, and sink. 
To this cause, at the carboniferous period, we would ascribe the origin of the coal forma¬ 
tions of North America. When we consider the vast accumulations of drift wood on the 
shores of the northern seas, as Greenland, Labrador, Spitzbergen, Iceland, &c., much of 
which is from the tropics, floated thither by the equatorial currents ; and the drift weed almost 
always seen floating in the Atlantic between the tropics, which is carried westward and north¬ 
ward by the equatorial current at certain seasons, and accumulates in what may be termed 
