The Fairy-Land of Science

At last, after long ages, when the thick mass of sandstones above the bed b (Fig. 46) had been laid down, the sinking must have stopped and the land have risen a little, so that the sea was driven back; and then the rivers would bring down earth again and make another clay-bed. Then a new forest would spring up, the ferns, Calamites, Lepidodendrons, and Sigillarias would gradually form another jungle, and many hundred of feet above the buried coal-bed b, a second bed of peat and vegetable matter would begin to accumulate to form the coal-bed a. Such is the history of how the coal which we now dig out of the depths of the earth once grew as beautiful plants on the surface. We cannot tell exactly all the ground over which these forests grew in England, because some of the coal they made has been carried away since by rivers and cut down by the waves of the sea, but we can say that wherever there is coal now, there they must have been then. Try and picture to yourselves that on the east coast of Northumberland and Durham, where all is now black with coal- dust, and grimy with the smoke of furnaces; and where the noise of hammers and steam-engines, and of carts and trucks hurrying to and fro, makes the country re-echo with the sound of labour; there ages ago in the silent swamp shaded with monster trees, one thin layer of plants after another was formed, year after year, to become the coal we now value so much. In Lancashire, busy Lancashire, the same thing was happening, and even in the middle of Yorkshire and Derbyshire the sea must have come up and washed a silent shore where a vast forest spread out over at least 700 or 800 square miles. In Stafford-shire, too, which is now almost the middle of England, another small coal-field tells the same story, while in South Wales the deep coal-mines and number of coal-seams remind us how for centuries and centuries forests must have flourished and have disappeared over and over again under the sand of the sea.