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Updated: May 2, 2025
The termination of the carboniferous formation is marked by symptoms of volcanic violence, which some geologists have considered to denote the close of one system of things and the beginning of another. Coal beds generally lie in basins, as if following the curve of the bottom of seas.
In the common salt by which strata are often largely impregnated, as in Patagonia, much soda is present, and potash enters largely into the composition of fossil sea-weeds, and recent analysis has also shown that the carboniferous strata in England, the Upper and Lower Silurian in East Canada, and the oldest clay-slates in Norway, all contain as much alkali as is generally present in metamorphic rocks.
Frogs as big as donkeys, and efts as long as crocodiles, luxuriated to their hearts' content in the marshy lowlands, and lorded it freely over the small creatures which they found in undisturbed possession of the Carboniferous isles.
Cassian beds exhibiting an abundant fauna of mixed mesozoic and palaeozoic types, in rocks of an epoch once supposed to be eminently poor in life; witness, lastly, the incessant disputes as to whether a given stratum shall be reckoned devonian or carboniferous, silurian or devonian, cambrian or silurian.
What are now known as coal districts owe their importance to the fact that they were areas of slow depression, during a greater or less portion of the carboniferous epoch; and that, in virtue of this circumstance, Mother Earth was enabled to cover up her vegetable treasures, and preserve them from destruction.
Of the 7000 feet of carboniferous strata here found, spread out over an area of 217 square miles, there are on the average eighteen seams of coal. This is only an instance of what is to be found elsewhere. Eighteen coal-seams! what does this mean?
It took it millions upon millions of years to get out of the sea upon dry land; and it took it more millions upon dry land, or since the Carboniferous age, when the air probably first began to be breathable, all the vast stretch of the Secondary and Tertiary ages, to get upright and develop a reasoning brain, and reach the estate of man. Step by step, in orderly succession, does creation move.
Hinc illoe lachrymoe: in plain English, hence the acute quarrel about primitive climate, and the close scanning of the geological chronicle for indications that the earth was not moist and warm until the end of the Carboniferous period.
Lyell and Dawson found carboniferous beds 1400 feet thick in Nova Scotia, with ancient root-bearing strata, one above the other, at no less than sixty-eight different levels.
There can be little doubt that the infusion of a large dose of this gas into the atmosphere at the present day would be attended by precisely the same circumstances as in the time of the carboniferous formation.
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