, vol. i. p. 453. And I cannot do better than
advise my readers, if they wish to know more of the way in which coal
was formed, to read what is said in that book concerning the Delta of
the Mississippi, and its strata of forests sunk where they grew, and
in some places upraised again, alternating with beds of clay and
sand, vegetable soil, recent sea-shells, and what not, forming, to a
depth of several hundred feet, just such a mass of beds as exists in
our own coal-fields at this day.

If, therefore, the reader wishes to picture to himself the scenery of
what is now central England, during the period when our coal was
being laid down, he has only, I believe, to transport himself in
fancy to any great alluvial delta, in a moist and warm climate,
favourable to the growth of vegetation. He has only to conceive
wooded marshes, at the mouth of great rivers, slowly sinking beneath
the sea; the forests in them killed by the water, and then covered up
by layers of sand, brought down from inland, till that new layer
became dry land, to carry a fresh crop of vegetation. He has thus
all that he needs to explain how coal-measures were formed. I myself
saw once a scene of that kind, which I should be sorry to forget; for
there was, as I conceived, coal, making, or getting ready to be made,
before my eyes: a sheet of swamp, sinking slowly into the sea; for
there stood trees, still rooted below high-water mark, and killed by
the waves; while inland huge trees stood dying, or dead, from the
water at their roots. But what a scene--a labyrinth of narrow
creeks, so narrow that a canoe could not pass up, haunted with
alligators and boa-constrictors, parrots and white herons, amid an
inextricable confusion of vegetable mud, roots of the alder-like
mangroves, and tangled creepers hanging from tree to tree; and
overhead huge fan-palms, delighting in the moisture, mingled with
still huger broad-leaved trees in every stage of decay. The drowned
vegetable soil of ages beneath me; above my head, for a hundred feet,
a mass of stems and boughs, and leaves and flowers, compared with
which the richest hothouse in England was poor and small. But if the
sinking process which was going on continued a few hundred years, all
that huge mass of wood and leaf would be sunk beneath the swamp, and
covered up in mud washed down from the mountains, and sand driven in
from the sea; to form a bed many feet thick, of what