CHAPTER VI.

THE STORY OF A PIECE OF COAL.

"A passion for plants had so grappled his soul,
That an old Hortus siccus each spare moment stole;
For which he had ransacked the swamps and the meads,
Till his Hortus was richest in grasses and reeds.
But a strange antiquarian whim he displayed;
From the simplest of plants his selection was made,
And of structure primeval like none we descry
'Mid the bountiful gifts that the seasons supply;
Nor confined he his search,-for the earth widely knew,
From the poles to the tropics the treasures he drew:
Which long in his cabinet hoarded so slily,
As an ancient Herbarium are prized very highly."

King Cole's Levee.

AN any of my listeners form any idea of what a million of years means? It is very difficult, I grant, but I cannot give any more definite conception of my own. great age than by saying I am many millions of years old. Before I attained my majority —that is to say, before I became really and positively coal— I had existed in manifold forms. You cannot hit upon a greater mistake than to suppose I was originally made just what you now see me- -a jetty mass of mineral. The doctrine of metempsychosis, said to be held by the Hindoos, would apply almost

literally to my own biography. You may trace my career through a hundred different stages, each more widely various than the other. Nay, the process of elaboration through which I have passed is so complex that I may well be forgiven if I have not a clear recollection of it myself.

I am English born and bred, notwithstanding the seemingly tropical character of my antecedents. In some measure, it may be thought that I hardly partake of English characteristics as regards the climate which affected my earlier career; but I can assure you I was never once removed from British ground. In the distant ages to which I have briefly referred, my recollections go back to waving forests of tree-ferns and gigantic club-mosses, as well as to a thick underwood of strange-looking plants. The name now given to this formation by geologists is termed the Carboniferous, and you may form some idea of the ages which have flowed away since then by the fact that no fewer than nine subsequent distinct formations and periods occurred. These are known as the Permian, Triassic, Liassic, Oolitic, Cretaceous (or chalk), Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene, to say nothing of the epoch comprehending the human race. To make myself still more clearly understood, it is necessary to state that the formations newer than that to which I belong attain a vertical thickness of more than fifty thousand feet! All this mass was slowly formed by gradual deposition along old sea-bottoms, &c., whilst

a more than equivalent period of time was taken up in the upheaving and other processes which have elevated these rocks into their present position!

G

very different from what they now are when I was born. You must imagine a soft balmy temperature, neither too hot nor too cold, and lacking those extremes which at present characterize the seasons. There was no great necessity for extreme heat

Fig. 30.

Branches, and fruit (Lepidostrobus) of Lepidodendron.

rather it was most important to the growth of a luxuriant vegetation to be free from cold. There were few ranges of hills or mountains, for these always cause a refrigeration of the atmosphere by condensing the clouds; thus hanging the sky with