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Updated: June 17, 2025
Gladstone talked the whole time of dinner upon the question of the exhaustion of the English coal-beds, to the surprise of the company and the unconcealed annoyance of the powerful guest. It was the subject then uppermost in his mind, and he either did not think of winning Mr. Delane or disdained to do so.
In describing the coal-beds he used his hat as a sort of model to illustrate his meaning; and the eyes of the king were fixed upon it as he proceeded with his interesting description. The conversation then passed to the rise and progress of trade and manufactures,—Mr.
The existence of extensive coal-beds in Borneo and Sumatra, of such recent origin that the leaves which abound in their shales are scarcely distinguishable from those of the forests which now cover the country, proves that such changes of level actually did take place; and it is a matter of much interest, both to the geologist and to the philosophic naturalist, to be able to form some conception of the order of those changes, and to understand how they may have resulted in the actual distribution of animal life in these countries; a distribution which often presents phenomena so strange and contradictory, that without taking such changes into consideration we are unable even to imagine how they could have been brought about.
The intercalated coal-beds, sixteen in number, are generally from one to five feet thick, one of them, which has two or three layers of clay interposed, attaining nine feet. At other points in the same coal-field the shales predominate over the sandstones.
Just as the growth of the forests for the Mesozoic vegetation has formed immense coal-beds in many parts of the world, even in Yorkshire and Scotland explains this great development of the insects, they would in their turn supply a rich diet to the smaller land animals and flying animals of the time. We shall see this presently.
Ever since there have been forests and marshes upon the earth there have been opportunities for the forming of coal-beds. Materials are accumulating even now which will in time be transformed to beds of coal. We must be equally careful to gain correct ideas of the making of petroleum, for many wrong notions are current.
Great forests grew, and by some convulsion were buried beneath the ocean, covered deep as they lay there with a sediment of earth and rock, and at length raised again as the waters retreated. The coal-beds of Cape Breton are the remains of a forest buried beneath the sea. Below the soil of Alberta is a vast jungle of vegetation, a dense mass of giant fern trees.
At the present day, when the consumption of coal, in our iron-furnaces and manufactories and for domestic use, is immense, we cannot but regard the exhaustion of our coal-beds as involving the destruction of a great portion of our private comfort and national prosperity.
What does surprise me is the ease with which we breathe. I can account for it only by supposing that, the Carboniferous period being already well advanced, most of the carbonic acid is already locked up in the forests or in Jupiter's coal-beds." "How, asked Bearwarden, "do you account for the 'great red spot' that appeared here in 1878, lasted several years, and then gradually faded?
We are unable to believe in the continuity of our coal-beds with those of America, for the great source of sediment in those times was a continent situated on the site of the Atlantic Ocean, and it is owing to this extensive continent that the forms of flora found in the coal-beds in each country bear so close a resemblance to one another, and also that the encrinital limestone which was formed in the purer depths of the ocean on the east, became mixed with silt, and formed masses of shaly impure limestone in the south-western parts of Ireland.
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