It is by this last that all authors
hitherto, in one shape or another, have endeavoured to explain the
changes that those strata must have undergone since the time of their
first formation at the bottom of the sea. They indiscriminately apply
the doctrine of infiltration to those strata of mineral coal as to any
other; they say that bituminous matter is infiltrated with the water,
impregnates certain strata of earth with bituminous matter, and thus
converts them into mineral coal, and bituminous strata. This is not
reasoning physically, or by the inductive method of proceeding upon
matter of fact; it is reasoning fantastically, or by making gratuitous
supposition founded merely on imagination. It was thus that natural
philosophers reasoned before the age of science; the wonder now is,
how men of science, in the present enlightened age, should suffer such
language of ignorance and credulity to pass uncensured.
The subject which I am now to treat of consists of peculiar strata of
the earth, bodies which we may investigate through all the stages of
their change, which is extreme; for, from vegetable bodies produced upon
the habitable earth, they are now become a mineral body, and the most
perfect coal,--a thing extremely different from what it had been, and
a thing which cannot be supposed to have been accomplished by the
operation of water alone, or any other agent in nature with which we
are acquainted, except the action of fire or heat.
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