I can offer is this--that the club-mosses, tree-
ferns, pines, and other low-ranked vegetation of the coal afforded
little or no food for animals, as the same families of plants do to
this day; and if creatures can get nothing to eat, they certainly
cannot multiply and replenish the earth. But, be that as it may, the
fact that coal is buried forest is not affected.

Meanwhile, the shape and arrangements of sea and land must have been
utterly different from what they are now. Where was that great land,
off which great rivers ran to deposit our coal-measures in their
deltas? It has been supposed, for good reasons, that north-western
France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany were then under the sea; that
Denmark and Norway were joined to Scotland by a continent, a tongue
of which ran across the centre of England, and into Ireland, dividing
the northern and southern coal-fields. But how far to the west and
north did that old continent stretch? Did it, as it almost certainly
did long ages afterwards, join Greenland and North America with
Scotland and Norway? Were the northern fields of Nova Scotia, which
are of the same geological age as our own, and contain the same
plants, laid down by rivers which ran off the same continent as ours?
Who can tell now? That old land, and all record of it, save what
these fragmentary coal-measures can give, are buried in the dark
abyss of countless ages; and we can only look back with awe, and
comfort ourselves with the thought--Let Time be ever so vast, yet
Time is not Eternity.

One word more. If my readers have granted that all for which I have
argued is probable, they will still have a right to ask for further
proof.

They will be justified in saying: "You say that coal is transformed
vegetable matter; but can you show us how the transformation takes
place? Is it possible according to known natural laws?"

The chemist must answer that. And he tells us that wood can become
lignite, or wood-coal, by parting with its oxygen, in the shape of
carbonic acid gas, or choke-damp; and then common or bituminous coal,
by parting with its hydrogen, chiefly in the form of carburetted
hydrogen--the gas with which we light our streets. That is about as
much as the unscientific reader need know. But it is a fresh
corroboration of the theory that coal has been once vegetable fibre,
for it shows how vegetable fibre can, by the laws of nature, become
coal. A