Note 72 — Chapter XI

Some observers have pointed to the occurrence of vertical and inclined trunks of trees in the Carboniferous sandstones, and deduced therefrom what has seemed to them a triumphant argument in favour of the rapidity wherewith our coal-fields must have formed. A foundered tree, they say, sank with its heavy-laden roots among the sand at the bottom, its stem pointing up into the water like the snags of the Mississippi, so that the sand must have come rapidly down to entomb the whole before it had time to decay, and thus thirty or forty feet of sediment must have been deposited in a few years, perhaps even months. But this is somewhat like a begging of the question. We have yet to learn how long a water-logged trunk will resist decomposition.