There one may see
huge dead trees with their bark seemingly sound, and their inside a
mere cavern with touchwood at the bottom; into which caverns one used
to peep with some caution. For though one might have found inside
only a pair of toucans, or parrots, or a whole party of jolly little
monkeys, one was quite as likely to find a poisonous snake four or
five feet long, whose bite would have very certainly prevented me
having the pleasure of writing this book.
Now is it not plain that if such trees as that sunk, their bark would
be turned into lignite, and at last into coal, while their insides
would be silted up with mud and sand? Thus a core or pillar of hard
sandstone would be formed, which might do to the collier of the
future what they are too apt to do now in the Newcastle and Bristol
collieries. For there, when the coal is worked out below, the
sandstone stems--"coal-pipes" as the colliers call them--in the roof
of the seam, having no branches, and nothing to hold them up but
their friable bark of coal, are but too apt to drop out suddenly,
killing or wounding the hapless men below.
Or again, if we find--as we very often find--as was found at
Parkfield Colliery, near Wolverhampton, in the year 1814--a quarter
of an acre of coal-seam filled. with stumps of trees as they grew,
their trunks broken off and lying in every direction, turned into
coal, and flattened, as coal-fossils so often are, by the weight of
the rock above--should we not have a right to say--These trees were
snapped off where they grew by some violent convulsion; by a storm,
or by a sudden inrush of water owing to a sudden sinking of the land,
or by the very earthquake shock itself which sank the land?
But what evidence have we of such sinkings? The plain fact that you
have coal-seam above coal-seam, each with its bed of under-clay; and
that therefore the land MUST have sunk ere the next bed of soil could
have been deposited, and the next forest have grown on it.
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