Stephen Bowers

“ Both Dana and Dawson bear testimony to the fact that graphite is a very common mineral in the older beds, and that the primitive carbon beds are equal in gravity to that of similar areas in the carboniferous system.
Why no fossil plants in the earlier coal deposits? Because no plants grew at that time. Then we must look for its origin elsewhere than in plants. If coal be a vegetable product, so is graphite. To say that animal organism aided in the process simply adds to the difficulty, since it is carbon that makes the organism and not the organism the carbon. ”

“ An exceedingly small part of vegetation remains unburnt.
Coal veins, which are from one foot to three hundred feet thick, would make a stratum around the earth ten feet thick. Fifty pounds of coal will yield 10,000 gallons of carbonic acid. Then calling eight gallons equal to one cubic foot the astonishing fact comes out that the coal beds actually draw from the atmosphere an ocean of carbonic acid which would have covered the globe to the depth of 12,500 feet, which would have destroyed all animal life. ”

“ Coal and peat are not found in the tropics where they ought to be found if vegetation produced them. And if they could be found there it would sweep the Vailan system from its foundations. They are found, however, just where this system says they must be found. Why is peat found in the ocean, and in the thousands of lakes and ponds where no peat vegetation is now growing? Suppose we find a peat bed forty feet thick, it must have been at one time a lake with forty feet of water, and how did the peat begin to grow? ”

“ The millions of fires from foundries, volcanoes, etc., are forming fuel wherever soot is formed, and were it not for the ever active oxygen of the air, it would all descend upon the earth as fuel and become incorporated in forming sedimentary beds. This is our claim for the coal, which as unconsumed carbon arose beyond the reach of destroying oxygen, from the heated, glowing furnace of our globe, and in time returned to the earth. ”

“ It is a planet upon which there is probably perpetual day. The belts are composed of the same kind of material [Pg 7] as the super-crust of the earth—silicious, calcareous and carbonaceous matter. They will in time become a part of the planet’s sedimentary formation.
When the inveterate fires of the sun shall have died out, forms of carbon and associated forms of aqueous and mineral matter will form an annular system around it.
A burning world must be a smoking world, and from its furnaces must arise vast volumes of unconsumed carbon to mingle with suspended vapors. ”

“ The usually accepted theory concerning the origin of coal is that it was formed from an ancient vegetation that grew largely in peat and swamp marshes. This theory the Vailan system overthrows.
Every atom of the great mass of carbon now forming the coal deposits must have been a distilled product of a primitive igneous process before the plant could possibly appropriate it. Every intelligent chemist knows that the great telluric gas furnace of primitive times was competent to produce all the carbon now found in the crust of the earth. ”

“ I need only point him to that grand clock-work of worlds shining from the firmament—every scintillating point, every rolling sun, is a witness of nature’s eternal order, and proclaims that uniformitarian principle of world evolution, by which the philosophic investigator must stand. The geologist must build on this rock of uniformity in the evolution of worlds. ”

“ The first and most important element of the earth’s crust is carbon. Of the more than 60,000 feet of aqueous beds there are probably none that it does not enter into as an important factor. It was first [Pg 11] driven from the earth by intense heat. The burning world was a smoking world. The unconsumed carbon commingled with the Annular vapors in the form of black, sooty, pitchy matter. This was deposited at the time of the deluge, and the waters that stood in seas, lakes and ponds deposited it as a layer of black, carbonaceous mud upon their bottoms. ”

“ When a carbon fall occurred the clay matter being of greater specific gravity was the first to find its way to the ocean floor.
This fire clay is found under beds of primitive graphite where no vegetation is involved, and therefore cannot be a vegetable distillation. It is found where glacial action is unknown, and cannot be mud pulverized by moving ice. Every one of the more than seventy coal seams of the Nova Scotia regions has its characteristic clay-bed. When we see trees standing in and surrounded by this clay we are forced to admit a rapid accumulation. ”

“ The simple fact that organic fossils are found in carbon beds changed to carbon affords no evidence that these organisms made the beds.
We find vegetable remains in coal seams just as we find them in any other rock. A coal plant as a lepidodendron, may begin in the lower clay, and pierce through a coal seam into the overhanging shale and sandstone. In the first it is a clay fossil, in the second a carbonaceous fossil, and in the third a silicious fossil. The fact is the trunk of a tree in an upright position in a coal bed, which is quite common, proves that the coal formed around it rapidly. ”

“ Soot, that sometimes takes fire in our chimneys, is deposited in infinitesimal smoke particles. Hence, smoke from burning carbon is simply a fuel which makes it evident that the smoke which arose from the igneous earth was a fuel hydro-carbon. The dark belts of Saturn and Jupiter are doubtless strata of carbon revolving about those planets.
If the Vailan theory is true the graphites and heavier forms of carbon were the first to fall upon the earth after the igneous period was passed, and will be found in its first aqueous beds, and generally unassociated with fossil vegetation. ”

“ Under almost all the carbon veins lies a deposit of fire clay. Strange that adjoining a highly combustible bed, a substance should be invariably planted that is so refractory as to be used for crucibles in fusing almost every known metal! In this bed lies involved a profuse marine vegetation, and the preservation of its delicate lineaments proves that it was suddenly involved. It is more generally present under coal veins that are more distant from the tropics, and invariably in the most distant ones. ”

“ The floating mass of primitive carbon clouds after they entered the atmosphere and floated away for centuries, perhaps, toward the polar regions in their efforts to reach the earth, became a tissue of evolving vegetable organisms and vegetable forms. Take fresh soot from a furnace soon as it is formed, subject it to hot vapors from boiling waters and store it away in an open vessel of water, and you will soon see vegetable and animal organisms start into being. ”

“ But if the old theory concerning the formation of coal is correct, how did it occur that the earth in rising out of the ocean stopped each time in the right place for swamp vegetation to accumulate? According to the highest authority coal is not formed from sea-plants, for they cannot emit any considerable amount of caloric, but it is the product of land plants. ”

“ All of the carbon in the grand casement of aqueous rocks, the vast oceans of oxygen now contained in the silicates, sulphates, carbonates and oxides of the crust, as well as the nitrogen and hydrogen in numerous compounds enormously swelled its volume. But the Annular Theory will claim but 100,000 miles as the atmosphere and that the earth rotated as now, once in twenty-four hours. At the equator it revolves at the rate of 1,000 miles an hour, at which rate the periphery [Pg 6] of the earth’s primitive atmosphere would revolve more than 25,000 miles an hour. ”

“ The heaviest beds of anthracite will be found in the northern part of the great plateau, and principally in British America if the Vailan theory is true.
Fossil plants in coal are generally mineralized charcoal, and are difficult of combination. If the bed was composed of vegetable production the same difficulty would certainly characterize the mass. Hence the plant is simply a foreign body in a bed of mineral carbon. Coal seams have become so hard as to be planed off by eroding forces directly after being laid down, or before heavy beds had accumulated over them. ”

“ The present glaciation of polar worlds is but the result of the last declension of outward vapors. The great ice caps of polar regions are moving toward the equator and are constantly diminishing. It is possible that we are approaching a day when the last ice berg will be borne toward the tropics, and the last glacier will melt, and a more genial climate pervade the greater portion of the earth. ”

“ The dust is doubtless of cosmic origin. There must be micro-cosmic clouds moving in interplanetary space, which meeting the earth in its path, are precipitated upon its surface.
We can scarcely conceive of matter anywhere without associating it with living forms. The outermost vapors of the annular system, which fell in the time of Noah, remained on high for unknown millions of years, receiving constant additions of meteoric and cosmic dust from without. ”

“ The sudden destruction of life, at the end of each age in geology, must have been caused by sudden cold. The waters reaching the earth at the poles must cause refrigeration; must cause excessive floods; must cause extermination of specific forms of life; must cause new distribution and condition of oceanic waters, and caused great folding and crumpling of strata.
In the dissolving of glaciers a vast pressure was lifted from the continents and transferred to the ocean beds, causing them to go down and the land to be elevated. ”

“ Carbon composing a peat bed is simply unconsumed carbon. The carbon or smoke that arises from every chimney and furnace when measurably shut up from immediate union with oxygen, remains an unburnt fuel precisely the same in kind as the unburnt carbon fuel of the peat bogs. Were we to collect the unburnt carbon from our chimneys in piles, where moisture and air could have free access, it would take fire spontaneously and burn, just as peat dug from the bog sometimes takes fire and burns. ”

“ The centripetal force of the rings was gradually retarded by the influence of the moon, and the gravital force was increased until the rings spread over the earth or approached it. When the innermost ring gradually descended toward the earth and came in contact with the air it was checked, and necessarily spread out toward the poles. Gravital force is strongest in the polar regions. If the rings of Saturn and Jupiter could increase their motion they would rise to greater heights. If they could become slower they would sink toward the poles. ”

“ When Saturn’s rings fall to the body of the planet its moons will necessarily retire a little farther from it. Astronomers say that our moon is gradually retiring from the earth. Then it must have had an annular system which fell and caused the moon to recede. ”

“ The lava that issues from a volcano is the deep bed-rock fused by pressure produced by lateral expansion. Accumulating sediments cause rock expansion in some regions, and being removed from others, causes contraction. Expansion elevates the earth’s crust; contraction lowers it.
A downfall of water that would raise the ocean fifty feet above its present level would cause an expansion that no rocks could resist, and its lateral pressure must result in mountain making. ”

“ They are clay fossils because they are imbedded in clay, same as fossils in coal are carbon because imbedded in carbon.
If coal is compressed peat, as some would have us believe, why do we not find fibres running vertically through it? You may examine peat after a pressure of twenty tons to the square inch has been exerted, and yet the vertical structure of the mass will be apparent. Since we find abundance of rootlets running in all directions, vertically as well as horizontally in the under clays of coal beds it is evident that coal is not a metamorphosed peat. ”

“ This great mass of vapor would rotate by centrifugal force at the equator, but there being no such force at the poles it was there kept from falling by heat alone. If the earth had not rotated the vapors would have occupied great heights; but centrifugal force being aided by actual rotation they were driven much farther. These forces necessarily drove the vapors over the equator. If, however, any vapors were left at the poles they must have fallen when the earth cooled down.
At that age rolled the first born ocean around the globe. Clouds formed, rain descended, and winds swept the earth. ”

“ It is evident if there ever was an Eden climate upon the earth its destruction was brought about by a change of climate. If the Deluge was a collapse of the last remnant of upper waters the latter must have begun to fall in polar regions many centuries previous. ”

“ Limestone is a deep sea formation and the Vailan system demands that standing trees should not be found in it. Only such limestone formation or strata as were deposited as mechanical precipitation could be formed in shallow waters, especially in regions beyond the tropics. A limestone stratum deposited among shore deposits or continental detritus points directly to Annular origin and vegetable fossils will occur [Pg 19] in the upper clays. ”

“ My object in sending forth this pamphlet is to call the attention of intelligent readers to a theory which must engage the attention of scientists in the future, and which will enable the geologist to make clear many things which are now obscure. ”