He has only to conceive
wooded marshes, at the mouth of great rivers, slowly sinking beneath
the sea; the forests in them killed by the water, and then covered up
by layers of sand, brought down from inland, till that new layer
became dry land, to carry a fresh crop of vegetation. He has thus
all that he needs to explain how coal-measures were formed. I myself
saw once a scene of that kind, which I should be sorry to forget; for
there was, as I conceived, coal, making, or getting ready to be made,
before my eyes: a sheet of swamp, sinking slowly into the sea; for
there stood trees, still rooted below high-water mark, and killed by
the waves; while inland huge trees stood dying, or dead, from the
water at their roots. But what a scene--a labyrinth of narrow
creeks, so narrow that a canoe could not pass up, haunted with
alligators and boa-constrictors, parrots and white herons, amid an
inextricable confusion of vegetable mud, roots of the alder-like
mangroves, and tangled creepers hanging from tree to tree; and
overhead huge fan-palms, delighting in the moisture, mingled with
still huger broad-leaved trees in every stage of decay. The drowned
vegetable soil of ages beneath me; above my head, for a hundred feet,
a mass of stems and boughs, and leaves and flowers, compared with
which the richest hothouse in England was poor and small.
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