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When they meet with the term "Carboniferous era," they take for granted that it was an era universally carboniferous that it was, what Hugh Miller indeed actually describes it, an era when the Earth bore a vegetation far more luxuriant than it has since done; and were they in any of our colonies to meet with a coal-bed, they would conclude that, as a matter of course, it was of the same age as the English coal-beds.
A lake yoked to a coal-bed would generally be voted a slow team, but the inventor of the steam engine saw how it could be made a very fast and a very powerful one; and we who live now are able to see that the discovery was made at the right time, and that, for the emergencies of this latter day, it has really quadrupled the power of civilized man.
Then the hills were piled up on top of it all; but here and there some edge of a coal-bed was tilted up, and appeared above the ground. This served for a hint to curious men, to make them ask "What is this?" and "What is it good for?" and so at last, following their questions, to find their way to the secret stores, and make an open doorway, and let the world in.
This accumulated mass of vegetable matter must be buried, however, before we can have a coal-bed. How was this accomplished?
Then a new forest would spring up, the ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendrons, and Sigillarias would gradually form another jungle, and many hundred of feet above the buried coal-bed b, a second bed of peat and vegetable matter would begin to accumulate to form the coal-bed a.
Now, it so happens that in a coal-bed at South Ouram, near Halifax, as well as in some other places, carbonate of lime trickled in before the plants were turned into coal, and made some round nodules in the plant-bed, which look like cannon- balls.
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