I have given you these hints, because you will naturally wish to know
what sort of a world it was in which all these strange plants grew
and turned into coal.
My answer is, that it was most probably just like the world in which
we are living now, with the one exception that the plants and animals
are different.
It was the fashion a few years since to explain the coal--like other
phenomena of geology--by some mere hypothesis of a state of things
quite unlike what we see now. We were brought up to believe that in
the Carboniferous, or coal-bearing era, the atmosphere was intensely
moist and hot, and overcharged with carbonic acid, which had been
poured out from the interior of the planet by volcanic eruptions, or
by some other convulsion. I forget most of it now: and really there
is no need to remember; for it is all, I verily believe, a dream--an
attempt to explain the unknown not by the known, but by the still
more unknown. You may find such theories lingering still in
sensational school-books, if you like to be unscientific. If you
like, on the other hand, to be scientific you will listen to those
who tell you that instead of there having been one unique
carboniferous epoch, with a peculiar coal-making climate, all epochs
are carboniferous if they get the chance; that coal is of every age,
from that of the Scotch and English beds, up to the present day.
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