Samuel Calvin

“ He must be dull, indeed, who can not see that in this significant mingling and blending of characters, the old coal forests epitomize and foreshadow all subsequent vegetation. All the structural elements were there; almost every fundamental type had a place in some of the curiously constructed plans of plant-life, and all progress in higher vegetable organization since then has come about through the unfolding and development of the possibilities, the carrying out of the promises, and the fulfillment of the prophecies that were woven into every tissue of the old ferns and club-mosses. ”

“ But, if there are sermons in stones, why not in coal? The black thing, that we would rather not handle when we have any proper regard for cleanliness, becomes an object of interest when we find it exerting energy in the engine-furnace or shedding warmth and radiance around our household hearth. It becomes an object of yet greater interest when we come to learn its wonderful history; for every common bit of coal that we are accustomed to see has a history with which is wrapped up the story of one of the most interesting and critical periods in all geological time. ”

“ Though the coal of Iowa was accumulated in what is called the Carboniferous age—an age of the world that is immensely distant from the present, infinitely so, indeed, as we count time—yet the processes of Nature were the same then as now. That old world was, in every essential particular, the same world that we know, and was governed by precisely the same laws that control it to-day. ”

“ The roots of the present strike very deeply into the past, and nothing is risked in saying that, had the Carboniferous age, in its strangely constituted life-forms or in any other regard, been different in ever so small a degree, the present would not be just what it is. It is away back in the coal that we find, not only the promise of the grandly diversified system of vegetable life that lends so much of beauty and interest to the age in which we live ”

“ The physicist will tell us how that energy, which drives our engines, warms and lights our rooms and makes it possible for us to sit here in comfort and never miss the light of the sun to-night, is simply so much force derived from the sunbeams of the Carboniferous age, invested for our benefit in the old ferns and club-mosses; and yet our interest in the coal rises above all this. ”

“ What is true of coal is also true of every part of the geological record to this extent: that all the strangely fascinating history recorded in the rocks must be read in the light of what may be seen actually taking place now. It has become a maxim of geology that, if we would know how anything was done in the past, we must study the method in which Nature is doing that very same thing in the present. ”

“ All around the globe, in the middle and higher latitudes, are beds of peat. Now, peat, especially when well pressed and dried, presents many very suggestive resemblances to coal. But there is not the slightest difficulty in determining how peat is formed, for we may see the process going on before our eyes. We can study every stage in the process, from the living and dead plants growing and accumulating in the marsh at one end of the series, to the completed peat-bed awaiting only the proper manipulation to be converted into useful fuel at the other. ”

“ But life has never been the exclusive property of plants, at least not since the geological record accessible to us began. Neither have plants monopolized the significant facts from which we may draw interesting conclusions regarding the laws of Nature and of being. In our study of the coal, we catch glimpses of animals that are worthy of notice. Their remains are left, along with the remains of plants, imbedded in the coal itself, or in the strata that limit the coal-seam above and below. ”

“ So it is that we have a very direct interest in that old coal age, an interest altogether independent of the coal itself, even though we know that modern industry and commerce and civilization, and the great centers of human population—the manufacturing and commercial cities, with all their wealth and magnificence—are directly dependent upon its marvelous stores of energy. ”

“ Indeed, the whole world, past and present, is ours, but only so far as mind and soul can lay bold of and possess its wondrous beauty, and still more wondrous meaning; beyond that it belongs to the dull ox as muck as to us. ”

“ But prophetic indications always become plainer after their fulfillment, and so we, by the aid of all subsequent life-history, are able to read in the structure of the Carboniferous reptiles the promise of better things. As the age draws on to its close, certain characters become more and more pronounced in some of the old, half-formed crocodiles, while a totally different set of peculiarities come to the front in others. ”

“ The sinking of the old marsh beneath the sea might seem to involve the loss of all the materials that had been accumulating during periods, perhaps, for which years would furnish no adequate unit of measure, and yet this very movement was essential to the preservation of the great magazines of energy on which human progress so much depends. I have already referred to it as a matter of considerable interest, that a large proportion of some coal is made up of crushed vegetable cells ”

“ Almost every seam of coal has been shown to rest on a bed of clay, called among miners the under-clay or dirt-bed. This clay is penetrated in every direction by fossil roots with upright stumps sometimes attached, and it requires no argument to show that it is an old fossil forest bed—the original soil in which some, at least, of the coal-plants rooted and grew. ”

“ All would tend to enforce the lesson that the world in the Carboniferous age was controlled and operated very much as at present. Trees germinated and grew to perfection and died, and the hollow stumps became the refuge of myriads of creeping things, that found safety from hungry enemies only in complete concealment. ”

“ There are many different kinds of coal, and coal belongs to many different epochs in the world's history, but that which we find in the coal-fields of Iowa and Illinois may be taken as the type of what is usually understood, the world over, when coal is mentioned. ”

“ In some of the groups recently brought to light from strata that mark the closing epochs of the Carboniferous age, the coming mammal is very plainly indicated. And so, if we only read aright, we may find in our piece of coal the suggestion and the promise of even the highest forms of life. ”

“ By proper manipulation we may obtain thin slices of coal suitable for microscopic examination, and in this way may demonstrate that a large proportion of it is composed of what seems to be crushed and flattened vegetable cells. You are all aware that plants of every kind are made up of little microscopic units called cells, and that these cells differ so much in markings and other characteristics in the different groups of plants that one group may often be distinguished from another by the study of the smallest microscopic fragments. ”

“ Is it not true that "an increasing purpose" does run through the ages by the processes of which, not only "the thoughts of men are widened," but enlarged encouragement is given to all their hopes and expectations of the future? ”

“ In the light of what may be observed going on in every favorably situated swamp to-day, the source of the material and the method of accumulation of the Rocky Mountain coal can hardly be doubtful. I need not weary you by leading you step by step through all the known coal-fields that illustrate the different stages in the process of coal-formation. ”

“ Of true fishes there were none—they are a much later product—but, of creatures that combined in the most unthought-of ways the characters of both fish and reptile, the seas seem to have been full. Fishes of the gar-pike pattern (and yet not like that either, for they were of no one pattern in particular) , with lungs far enough developed to enable them to carry on respiration in the air as well as in the water, were on the whole most abundant. In some particulars these creatures stood very low in the scale of fish-life, and yet in others they outranked any fishes with which we are familiar. ”

“ The color, hardness, and other physical properties of coal, together with the fact that coal-beds are often buried under hundreds of feet of rock and soil, may well make us hesitate before accepting any such conclusion. ”

“ During the Carboniferous age, the same thing was true, and it often happened that the area that was carried beneath the sea was, in time, reëlevated, and became the platform on which other forests and peat-bogs renewed the work of coal-making. Thus it is that in many coal-fields we find a number of seams, one above the other, and thus it is that we have registered in the coal-beds of Nova Scotia not less than seventy-six distinct upward and downward movements of the surface. ”

“ It is to the animals of higher rank that we must give attention. Let us remember that the Carboniferous age comes just after that which witnessed the introduction of fishes—the earliest as well as the lowest of animals having brains, and heads, and spinal columns. ”

“ It is, however, in their relationship with modern plants that they are principally interesting. In the moist woods of New England, and farther south along the summits of the Alleghany Mountains, there lingers a group of little plants, called Lycopods, ground-pines or club-mosses, that must be regarded as the nearest living relatives of Lepidodendron. The habit of growth is very much the same; the mode of fruiting is almost identical; the little spores are produced with the same extravagant copiousness, and, being resinous, are highly inflammable. ”

“ The plants, themselves, on which this old coal-producing fruit was borne, and whose carbonized stems and leaves lie heaped up and mingled with the spores, have some lessons of interest for the student of world-history. ”

“ All investigation only adds grander significance to the grand utterance of Agassiz, that "man is the end toward which all the animal creation has tended since the first appearance of the first palæozoic fishes." ”

“ The information is interesting—in many respects it is of the highest importance—but for the purposes of the present discussion it amounts, after all, to telling what men have more or less clearly perceived for the last thousand years or more, that coal will burn. ”

“ We are indebted to the patient labor of a number of observers for the fact that the smaller granules are the spores or seeds of some plant of inferior organization, and the larger sacs are fruit-cases in which the spores were developed. ”

“ You may then, if you please, call the Lepidodendrons and their allies gigantic club-mosses; and yet, if you do no more than that, you will fall a long way short of doing them full justice. For though in the mode of fruiting they are indeed club-mosses, and nothing else, yet, as regards other essential structural characters, they deserve a much higher rank. Taking a section of the stem of Sigillaria, for example, and studying the arrangement of the tissues—the pith, wood, bark, and vascular bundles—we find a plan of structure that characterizes only the very highest of modern plants (Fig. 9) . ”

“ It lies, therefore, very near the focus toward which all the genealogical lines of our present vertebrates converge, and hence every structural feature in the higher Carboniferous animals becomes invested with a peculiar interest. ”