But the purity of the water in peaty lagoons is
observable elsewhere than in the delta of the Mississippi. What can
be more transparent than many a pool surrounded by quaking bogs,
fringed, as they are in Ireland, with a ring of white water-lilies,
which you dare not stoop to pick, lest the peat, bending inward,
slide you down into that clear dark gulf some twenty feet in depth,
bottomed and walled with yielding ooze, from which there is no
escape? Most transparent, likewise, is the water of the West Indian
swamps. Though it is of the colour of coffee, or rather of dark
beer, and so impregnated with gases that it produces fever or cholera
when drunk, yet it is--at least when it does not mingle with the salt
water--so clear, that one might see every marking on a boa-
constrictor or alligator, if he glided along the bottom under the
canoe.
But now comes the question--Even if all this be true, how were the
forests covered up in shale and sandstone, one after another?
By gradual sinking of the land, one would suppose.
If we find, as we may find in a hundred coal-pits, trees rooted as
they grew, with their trunks either standing up through the coal, and
through the sandstone above the coal; their bark often remaining as
coal while their inside is filled up with sandstone, has not our
common-sense a right to say--The land on which they grew sank below
the water-line; the trees were killed; and the mud and sand which
were brought down the streams enveloped their trunks? As for the
inside being full of sandstone, have we not all seen hollow trees?
Do we not all know that when a tree dies its wood decays first, its
bark last? It is so, especially in the Tropics.
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