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Updated: June 20, 2025
The only theory which explained all the recognised phenomena of the coal-measures was that the plants forming the coal actually grew where the coal was formed, and where, indeed, we now find it.
But if we consider the matter more closely, I think that this apparent objection loses its force. It is clear that, during the Carboniferous epoch, the vast area of land which is now covered by Coal-measures must have been undergoing a gradual depression.
In the troughs of the foldings thus formed the coal-measures rest, those portions which had been thrown up as anticlines having suffered loss by denudation.
They are regularly interstratified with the sandstone, shale, and iron-stone of the lower coal-measures, and, on the East Lomond, with Mountain Limestone. I examined these trap-rocks in 1838, in the cliffs south of St. Andrews, where they consist in great part of stratified tuffs, which are curved, vertical, and contorted, like the associated coal-measures.
The strata found in the various coal-fields differ considerably amongst themselves in character. There are, however, certain well-defined characteristics which find representation in most of the principal coal-fields, whether British or European. Professor Hull classifies these carboniferous beds as follows: UPPER CARBONIFEROUS. Upper coal-measures.
B. Synclinal of Shoulie River. 1. Coal-measures. 2. After the strata No. 2 had been elaborated, the conditions proper to a great delta exclusively prevailed, the subsidence still continuing so that one forest after another grew and was submerged until their under-clays with roots, and usually seams of coal, were left at more than eighty distinct levels.
And the great earth-angel, who grinds up mountains into paint, as you do bits of ochre, for his "Continental Sketches," found in it the materials for a whole dark ground-tone of coal-measures, and a few hundred miles of warm high-lights, which we call New Red Sandstone. What a sea-wall they are, those Exmoor hills!
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.
From this it is possible to form a faint idea of the enormous growths of vegetation required to form some of our representative coal beds. But the coal is not found in one continuous bed. These numerous seams of coal are interspersed between many thousands of feet of sedimentary deposits, the whole of which form the "coal-measures."
No vertebrated animals more highly organised than fish were known in rocks of higher antiquity than the Permian until the year 1844, when the Apateon pedestris, Meyer, was discovered in the coal-measures of Munster-Appel in Rhenish Bavaria, and three years later, in 1847, Professor von Dechen found three other distinct species of the same family of Amphibia in the Saarbruck coal-field above alluded to.
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