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Updated: June 20, 2025
He regards the British coal-measures as having been laid down in two, or at most three, areas of deposition one south of this ridge, the remainder to the north of it. In regard to the extent of the former deposits of coal in Ireland, there is every probability that the sister island was just as favourably treated in this respect as Great Britain.
A large proportion of the plants of the coal-measures were ferns, some authorities say one-half. From their great abundance we may infer the great heat and moisture of the atmosphere at the time when they grew, as similar ferns at the present day are only found in the greatest abundance on small tropical islands where the temperature is high.
The impressions they have left on the shales of the coal-measures are most striking, and point to a time when the sandy clay which imbedded them was borne by water in a very tranquil manner, to be deposited where the ferns had grown, enveloping them gradually, and consolidating them into their mass of future shale.
Those of Ayrshire have long been recognised as of the same period; as they rest unconformably on the coal measures, and consist of porphyrites, melaphyres, and tuffs of volcanic origin. Carboniferous Period. Volcanic rocks occur amongst the coal-measures of England and Scotland, while they are also found interbedded with the Carboniferous Limestone series in Derbyshire, Scotland, and Co.
It may be said that the Carboniferous formations demonstrate the existence of a vast extent of dry land in the present dry-land area, and that the supposed terrestrial Palaeozoic Vertebrate Fauna ought to have left its remains in the Coal-measures, especially as there is now reason to believe that much of the coal was formed by the accumulation of spores and sporangia on dry land.
These alternations of beds of coal, clay, and rock may be repeated many times, and are known as the "coal-measures"; and in some regions, as in South Wales and in Nova Scotia, the coal-measures attain a thickness of twelve or fourteen thousand feet, and enclose eighty or a hundred seams of coal, each with its under-clay, and separated from those above and below by beds of sandstone and shale.
Coal-measures, Edinburgh. c. Stem and spike; 1/2 natural size. b. Remains of the spathe magnified. c. Portion of spike magnified. d. Robert Paterson. The spike is covered on the exposed surface with the four-cleft calyces of the flowers arranged in parallel rows.
Articulate animals of the genus Scorpion were found by Count Sternberg in 1835 in the coal-measures of Bohemia, and about the same time in those of Coalbrook Dale by Mr. Prestwich, were also true insects, such as beetles of the family Curculionidae, a neuropterous insect of the genus Corydalis, and another related to the Phasmidae, have been found. Wing of a Grasshopper.
It has long been the opinion of the most eminent geologists that the coal-fields of Yorkshire and Lancashire were once united, the upper Coal-measures and the overlying Millstone Grit and Yoredale rocks having been subsequently removed; but what is remarkable, is the ancient date now assigned to this denudation, for it seems that a thickness of no less than 10,000 feet of the coal-measures had been carried away before the deposition even of the lower Permian rocks which were thrown down upon the already disturbed truncated edges of the coal-strata.
Gryllacris lithanthraca, Goldenberg. Professor Goldenberg published, in 1854, descriptions of no less than twelve species of insects from the nodular clay-ironstone of Saarbruck, near Treves. Professor Goldenberg showed me, in 1864, the wing of a white ant, found low down in the productive coal-measures of Saarbruck, in the interior of a flattened Lepidodendron.
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