It will thus appear, that the regular form, and horizontal direction of strata throughout this country of coal, now under contemplation, has been broken and disordered by the eruption and interjection of those masses of basaltic stone or subterraneous lava; and thus may be explained not only the disorders and irregularities of coal strata, but also the different qualities of this bituminous substance from its more natural state to that of a perfect coal or fixed infusible and combustible substance burning without smoke.  This happens sometimes to a part of a coal stratum which approaches the whin-stone.

Having thus stated the case of combustible or bituminous strata, I would ask those naturalists, who adhere to the theory of infiltration and the operation of water alone, how they are to conceive those strata formed and consolidated.  They must consider, that here are immense bodies of those combustible strata, under hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fathoms of sand-stone, iron-stone, argillaceous and calcareous strata.  If they are to suppose bituminous bodies collected at the bottom of the sea, they must say from whence that bitumen had come; for, with regard to the strata below those bituminous bodies, above them, and between them, we see perfectly from whence had come the materials of which they are formed.  They cannot say that it is from a collection of earthy matter which had been afterwards bituminized by infiltration; for, although we find many of those earthy strata variously impregnated with the bituminous and coaly matter, I have shown that the earthy and the bituminous matter had subsided together; besides, there are many of those coaly and bituminous strata in which there is no more than two or three per cent. of earthy matter or ashes after burning; therefore the strata must have been formed of bituminous matter, and not simply impregnated with it.

To avoid this difficulty, we shall allow them to form their strata, which certainly is the case in great part, by the collection of vegetable bodies; then, I desire them to say, in what manner they are to consolidate those bodies.  If they shall allege that it is by simple pressure, How shall we conceive the numerous veins of spar and pyrites, which traverse those strata in all directions, to be formed in those bodies consolidated by the compression of the superincumbent masses?—­Here is a manifest inconsistency, which proves that it could not be.  But, even were we to suppose all those difficulties to be over come, there is still an impossibility in the way of that inconsiderate theory, and this will appear more fully in the following chapter.

SECT.  III.—­The Mineralogical Operations of the Earth illustrated from the Theory of Fossil Coal.