There cannot therefore be a doubt, that if this vegetable substance,
which is formed by the collection of wood and plants in water upon the
surface of the earth, were to be found in the place of fossil coal, and
to undergo the mineral operations of the globe, it must at least augment
the quantity of those strata, though it should not form distinct strata
by itself.
It may perhaps be thought that vegetable bodies and their impalpable
parts are things too far distant in the scale of magnitude to be
supposed as subsiding together in the ocean; and this would certainly be
a just observation with regard to any other species of bodies: But the
nature of vegetable bodies is to be floatant in water; so that we may
suppose them carried at any distance from the shore; consequently, the
size of the body here makes no difference with regard to the place or
order in which these are to be deposited.
The examination of fossil coal fully confirms those reasonable
suppositions. For, _first_, The strata that attend coal, whether the
sandstone or the argillaceous strata, commonly, almost universally,
abound with the most distinct evidence of vegetable substances; this
is the impressions of plants which are found in their composition.
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