Town Geology

Now whence did all that enormous mass of vegetable soil come?  Off some neighbouring land, was the first and most natural answer.  It was a rational one.  It proceeded from the known to the unknown.  It was clear that these plants had grown on land; for they were land-plants.  It was clear that there must have been land close by, for between the beds of coal, as you all know, the rock is principally coarse sandstone, which could only have been laid down (as I have explained to you already) in very shallow water.

It was natural, then, to suppose that these plants and trees had been swept down by rivers into the sea, as the sands and muds which buried them had been.  And it was known that at the mouths of certain rivers—the Mississippi, for instance—vast rafts of dead floating trees accumulated; and that the bottoms of the rivers were often full of snags, etc.; trees which had grounded, and stuck in the mud; and why should not the coal have been formed in the same way?

Because—and this was a serious objection—then surely the coal would be impure—mixed up with mud and sand, till it was not worth burning.  Instead of which, the coal is usually pure vegetable, parted sharply from the sandstone which lies on it.  The only other explanation was, that the coal vegetation had grown in the very places where it was found.  But that seemed too strange to be true, till that great geologist, Sir W. Logan—who has since done such good work in Canada—showed that every bed of coal had a bed of clay under it, and that that clay always contained fossils called Stigmaria.  Then it came out that the Stigmaria in the under clay had long filaments attached to them, while when found in the sandstones or shales, they had lost their filaments, and seemed more or less rolled—in fact, that the natural place of the Stigmaria was in the under clay.  Then Mr. Binney discovered a tree—a Sigillaria, standing upright in the coal-measures with its roots attached.  Those roots penetrated into the under clay of the coal; and those roots were Stigmarias.  That seems to have settled the question.  The Sigillarias, at least, had grown where they were found, and the clay beneath the coal-beds was the original soil on which they had grown.  Just so, if you will look at any peat bog you will find it bottomed by clay, which clay is pierced everywhere by the roots of the moss forming the peat, or of the trees, birches, alders, poplars, and willows, which grow in the bog.  So the proof seemed complete, that the coal had been formed out of vegetation growing where it was buried.  If any further proof for that theory was needed, it would be found in this fact, most ingeniously suggested by Mr. Boyd Dawkins.  The resinous spores, or seeds of the Lepidodendra make up—as said above—a great part of the bituminous coal.  Now those spores are so light, that if the coal had been laid down by water, they would have floated on it, and have been carried away; and therefore the bituminous coal must have been formed, not under water, but on dry land.

I have dwelt at length on these further arguments, because they seem to me as pretty a specimen as I can give my readers of that regular and gradual induction, that common-sense regulated, by which geological theories are worked out.

But how does this theory explain the perfect purity of the coal?  I think Sir C. Lyell answers that question fully in p. 383 of his “Student’s Elements of Geology.”  He tells us that the dense growths of reeds and herbage which encompass the margins of forest-covered swamps in the valley and delta of the Mississippi, in passing through them, are filtered and made to clear themselves entirely before they reach the areas in which vegetable matter may accumulate for centuries, forming coal if the climate be favourable; and that in the cypress-swamps of that region no sediment mingles with the vegetable matter accumulated from the decay of trees and semi-aquatic plants; so that when, in a very dry season, the swamp is set on fire, pits are burnt into the ground many feet deep, or as far as the fire can go down without reaching water, and scarcely any earthy residuum is left; just as when the soil of the English fens catches fire, red-hot holes are eaten down through pure peat till the water-bearing clay below is reached.  But the purity of the water in peaty lagoons is observable elsewhere than in the delta of the Mississippi.  What can be more transparent than many a pool surrounded by quaking bogs, fringed, as they are in Ireland, with a ring of white water-lilies, which you dare not stoop to pick, lest the peat, bending inward, slide you down into that clear dark gulf some twenty feet in depth, bottomed and walled with yielding ooze, from which there is no escape?  Most transparent, likewise, is the water of the West Indian swamps.  Though it is of the colour of coffee, or rather of dark beer, and so impregnated with gases that it produces fever or cholera when drunk, yet it is—at least when it does not mingle with the salt water—so clear, that one might see every marking on a boa-constrictor or alligator, if he glided along the bottom under the canoe.

But now comes the question—Even if all this be true, how were the forests covered up in shale and sandstone, one after another?

By gradual sinking of the land, one would suppose.

If we find, as we may find in a hundred coal-pits, trees rooted as they grew, with their trunks either standing up through the coal, and through the sandstone above the coal; their bark often remaining as coal while their inside is filled up with sandstone, has not our common-sense a right to say—The land on which they grew sank below the water-line; the trees were killed; and the mud and sand which were brought down the streams enveloped their trunks?  As for the inside being full of sandstone, have we not all seen hollow trees?  Do we not all know that when a tree dies its wood decays first, its bark last?  It is so, especially in the Tropics.  There one may see huge dead trees with their bark seemingly sound, and their inside a mere cavern with touchwood at the bottom; into which caverns one used to peep with some caution.  For though one might have found inside only a pair of toucans, or parrots, or a whole party of jolly little monkeys, one was quite as likely to find a poisonous snake four or five feet long, whose bite would have very certainly prevented me having the pleasure of writing this book.

Now is it not plain that if such trees as that sunk, their bark would be turned into lignite, and at last into coal, while their insides would be silted up with mud and sand?  Thus a core or pillar of hard sandstone would be formed, which might do to the collier of the future what they are too apt to do now in the Newcastle and Bristol collieries.  For there, when the coal is worked out below, the sandstone stems—“coal-pipes” as the colliers call them—in the roof of the seam, having no branches, and nothing to hold them up but their friable bark of coal, are but too apt to drop out suddenly, killing or wounding the hapless men below.

Or again, if we find—as we very often find—as was found at Parkfield Colliery, near Wolverhampton, in the year 1814—a quarter of an acre of coal-seam filled. with stumps of trees as they grew, their trunks broken off and lying in every direction, turned into coal, and flattened, as coal-fossils so often are, by the weight of the rock above—should we not have a right to say—These trees were snapped off where they grew by some violent convulsion; by a storm, or by a sudden inrush of water owing to a sudden sinking of the land, or by the very earthquake shock itself which sank the land?

But what evidence have we of such sinkings?  The plain fact that you have coal-seam above coal-seam, each with its bed of under-clay; and that therefore the land must have sunk ere the next bed of soil could have been deposited, and the next forest have grown on it.

In one of the Rocky Mountain coal-fields there are more than thirty seams of coal, each with its under-clay below it.  What can that mean but thirty or more subsidences of the land, and the peat of thirty or more forests or peat-mosses, one above the other?  And now if any reader shall say, Subsidence?  What is this quite new element which you have brought into your argument?  You told us that you would reason from the known to the unknown.  What do we know of subsidence?  You offered to explain the thing which had gone on once by that which is going on now.  Where is subsidence going on now upon the surface of our planet?  And where, too, upheaval, such as would bring us these buried forests up again from under the sea-level, and make them, like our British coal-field, dry land once more?

The answer is—Subsidence and elevation of the land are common now, probably just as common as they were in any age of this planet’s history.

To give two instances, made now notorious by the writings of geologists.  As lately as 1819 a single earthquake shock in Cutch, at the mouth of the Indus, sunk a tract of land larger than the Lake of Geneva in some places to a depth of eighteen feet, and converted it into an inland sea.  The same shock raised, a few miles off, a corresponding sheet of land some fifty miles in length, and in some parts sixteen miles broad, ten feet above the level of the alluvial plain, and left it to be named by the country-people the “Ullah Bund,” or bank of God, to distinguish it from the artificial banks in the neighbourhood.

Again: in the valley of the Mississippi—a tract which is now, it would seem, in much the same state as central England was while our coal-fields were being laid down—the earthquakes of 1811-12 caused large lakes to appear suddenly in many parts of the district, amid the dense forests of cypress.  One of these, the “Sunk Country,” near New Madrid, is between seventy and eighty miles in length, and thirty miles in breadth, and throughout it, as late as 1846, “dead trees were conspicuous, some erect in the water, others fallen, and strewed in dense masses over the bottom, in the shallows, and near the shore.”  I quote these words from Sir Charles Lyell’s “Principles of Geology” (11th edit.), 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 would be first peat, then lignite, and last, it may be, coal, with the stems of killed trees standing up out of it into the new mud and sand-beds above it, just as the Sigillariæ and other stems stand up in the coal-beds both of Britain and of Nova Scotia; while over it a fresh forest would grow up, to suffer the same fate—if the sinking process went on—as that which had preceded it.

That was a sight not easily to be forgotten.  But we need not have gone so far from home, at least, a few hundred years ago, to see an exactly similar one.  The fens of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, before the rivers were embanked, the water pumped off, the forests felled, and the reed-beds ploughed up, were exactly in the same state.  The vast deposits of peat between Cambridge and the sea, often filled with timber-trees, either fallen or upright as they grew, and often mixed with beds of sand or mud, brought down in floods, were formed in exactly the same way; and if they had remained undrained, then that slow sinking, which geologists say is going on over the whole area of the Fens, would have brought them gradually, but surely, below the sea-level, to be covered up by new forests, and converted in due time into coal.  And future geologists would have found—they may find yet, if, which God forbid, England should become barbarous and the trees be thrown out of cultivation—instead of fossil Lepidodendra and Sigillariæ, Calamites and ferns, fossil ashes and oaks, alders and poplars, bulrushes and reeds.  Almost the only fossil fern would have been that tall and beautiful Lastræa Thelypteris, once so abundant, now all but destroyed by drainage and the plough.

We need not, therefore, fancy any extraordinary state of things on this planet while our English coal was being formed.  The climate of the northern hemisphere—Britain, at least, and Nova Scotia—was warmer than now, to judge from the abundance of ferns; and especially of tree-ferns; but not so warm, to judge from the presence of conifers (trees of the pine tribe), as the Tropics.  Moreover, there must have been, it seems to me, a great scarcity of animal-life.  Insects are found, beautifully preserved; a few reptiles, too, and land-shells; but very few.  And where are the traces of such a swarming life as would be entombed were a tropic forest now sunk; which is found entombed in many parts of our English fens?  The only explanation which 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.  And it certainly helps us to believe that a thing has been done, if we are shown that it can be done.

This fact explains, also, why in mines of wood-coal carbonic acid, i.e. choke-damp, alone is given off.  For in the wood-coal a great deal of the hydrogen still remains.  In mines of true coal, not only is choke-damp given off, but that more terrible pest of the miners, fire-damp, or explosive carburetted hydrogen and olefiant gases.  Now the occurrence of that fire-damp in mines proves that changes are still going on in the coal: that it is getting rid of its hydrogen, and so progressing toward the state of anthracite or culm—stone-coal as it is sometimes called.  In the Pennsylvanian coal-fields some of the coal has actually done this, under the disturbing force of earthquakes; for the coal, which is bituminous, like our common coal, to the westward where the strata are horizontal, becomes gradually anthracite as it is tossed and torn by the earthquake faults of the Alleghany and Appalachian mountains.

And is a further transformation possible?  Yes; and more than one.  If we conceive the anthracite cleared of all but its last atoms of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, till it has become all but pure carbon, it would become—as it has become in certain rocks of immense antiquity, graphite—what we miscall black-lead.  And, after that, it might go through one transformation more, and that the most startling of all.  It would need only perfect purification and crystallisation to become—a diamond; nothing less.  We may consider the coal upon the fire as the middle term of a series, of which the first is live wood, and the last diamond; and indulge safely in the fancy that every diamond in the world has probably, at some remote epoch, formed part of a growing plant.

A strange transformation; which will look to us more strange, more truly poetical, the more steadily we consider it.

The coal on the fire; the table at which I write—what are they made of?  Gas and sunbeams; with a small percentage of ash, or earthy salts, which need hardly be taken into account.

Gas and sunbeams.  Strange, but true.

The life of the growing plant—and what that life is who can tell?—laid hold of the gases in the air and in the soil; of the carbonic acid, the atmospheric air, the water—for that too is gas.  It drank them in through its rootlets: it breathed them in through its leaf-pores, that it might distil them into sap, and bud, and leaf, and wood.  But it has to take in another element, without which the distillation and the shaping could never have taken place.  It had to drink in the sunbeams—that mysterious and complex force which is for ever pouring from the sun, and making itself partly palpable to our senses as heat and light.  So the life of the plant seized the sunbeams, and absorbed them, buried them in itself—no longer as light and heat, but as invisible chemical force, locked up for ages in that woody fibre.

So it is.  Lord Lytton told us long ago, in a beautiful song, how

The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose.

But Nature’s poetry was more beautiful than man’s.  The wind and the beam loved the rose so well that they made the rose—or rather, the rose took the wind and the beam, and built up out of them, by her own inner life, her exquisite texture, hue, and fragrance.

What next?  The rose dies; the timber tree dies; decays down into vegetable fibre, is buried, and turned to coal: but the plant cannot altogether undo its own work.  Even in death and decay it cannot set free the sunbeams imprisoned in its tissue.  The sun-force must stay, shut up age after age, invisible, but strong; working at its own prison-cells; transmuting them, or making them capable of being transmuted by man, into the manifold products of coal—coke, petroleum, mineral pitch, gases, coal-tar, benzole, delicate aniline dyes, and what not, till its day of deliverance comes.

Man digs it, throws it on the fire, a black, dead-seeming lump.  A corner, an atom of it, warms till it reaches the igniting point; the temperature at which it is able to combine with oxygen.

And then, like a dormant live thing, awaking after ages to the sense of its own powers, its own needs, the whole lump is seized, atom after atom, with an infectious hunger for that oxygen which it lost centuries since in the bottom of the earth.  It drinks the oxygen in at every pore; and burns.

And so the spell of ages is broken.  The sun-force bursts its prison-cells, and blazes into the free atmosphere, as light and heat once more; returning in a moment into the same forms in which it entered the growing leaf a thousand centuries since.

Strange it all is, yet true.  But of nature, as of the heart of man, the old saying stands—that truth is stranger than fiction.

V. THE LIME IN THE MORTAR

I shall presume in all my readers some slight knowledge about lime.  I shall take for granted, for instance, that all are better informed than a certain party of Australian black fellows were a few years since.

In prowling on the track of a party of English settlers, to see what they could pick up, they came—oh joy!—on a sack of flour, dropped and left behind in the bush at a certain creek.  The poor savages had not had such a prospect of a good meal for many a day.  With endless jabbering and dancing, the whole tribe gathered round the precious flour-bag with all the pannikins, gourds, and other hollow articles it could muster, each of course with a due quantity of water from the creek therein, and the chief began dealing out the flour by handfuls, beginning of course with the boldest warriors.  But, horror of horrors, each man’s porridge swelled before his eyes, grew hot, smoked, boiled over.  They turned and fled, man, woman, and child, from before that supernatural prodigy; and the settlers coming back to look for the dropped sack, saw a sight which told the whole tale.  For the poor creatures, in their terror, had thrown away their pans and calabashes, each filled with that which it was likely to contain, seeing that the sack itself had contained, not flour, but quick-lime.  In memory of which comi-tragedy, that creek is called to this day, “Flour-bag Creek.”

Now I take for granted that you are all more learned than these black fellows, and know quick-lime from flour.  But still you are not bound to know what quick-lime is.  Let me explain it to you.

Lime, properly speaking, is a metal, which goes among chemists by the name of calcium.  But it is formed, as you all know, in the earth, not as a metal, but as a stone, as chalk or limestone, which is a carbonate of lime; that is, calcium combined with oxygen and carbonic-acid gases.

In that state it will make, if it is crystalline and hard, excellent building stone.  The finest white marble, like that of Carrara in Italy, of which the most delicate statues are carved, is carbonate of lime altered and hardened by volcanic heat.  But to make mortar of it, it must be softened and then brought into a state in which it can be hardened again; and ages since, some man or other, who deserves to rank as one of the great inventors, one of the great benefactors of his race, discovered the art of making lime soft and hard again; in fact of making mortar.  The discovery was probably very ancient; and made, probably like most of the old discoveries, in the East, spreading Westward gradually.  The earlier Greek buildings are cyclopean, that is, of stone fitted together without mortar.  The earlier Egyptian buildings, though the stones are exquisitely squared and polished, are put together likewise without mortar.  So, long ages after, were the earlier Roman buildings, and even some of the later.  The famous aqueduct of the Pont du Gard, near Nismes, in the south of France, has, if I recollect right, no mortar whatever in it.  The stones of its noble double tier of circular arches have been dropped into their places upon the wooden centres, and stand unmoved to this day, simply by the jamming of their own weight; a miracle of art.  But the fact is puzzling; for these Romans were the best mortar makers of the world.  We cannot, I believe, surpass them in the art even now; and in some of their old castles, the mortar is actually to this day harder and tougher than the stones which it holds together.  And they had plenty of lime at hand if they had chosen to make mortar.  The Pont du Gard crosses a limestone ravine, and is itself built of limestone.  But I presume the cunning Romans would not trust mortar made from that coarse Nummulite limestone, filled with gritty sand, and preferred, with their usual carefulness, no mortar at all to bad.