The great inland sea that covered the middle portion of the continent during the Silurian and the Devonian periods, became shallow by the deposit of vast quantities of sediment. Along the lines of the deposits of greatest thickness, a crumpling of the earth's crust lifted the first fold of the Alleghany Mountains as a great sea wall on the east, and on the western shore another formed the beginning of the Ozark Mountain system in Missouri. An island was lifted out of the sea, forming the elevated ground on which the city of Cincinnati now stands. Various other ridges and islands divided the ancient sea into much smaller bodies of water. Hemmed in by land these shallow sea-basins gradually changed into fresh-water lakes, for they no longer had connection with the ocean, and all the water they received came from rain. After centuries of freshets, and of filling in with the rock débris brought by the streams, they became great marshes, in which grew water-loving plants. Generation after generation of these plants died, and their remains, submerged by the water, were converted into peat. In the course of ages this peat became coal. This is the history of the coal measures. There is no guesswork here. The stems of plants do not lose their microscopic structure in all the ages it has taken to transform them to coal. A thin section of coal shows under a magnifier the structure of the stems of the coal-forming plants. Moreover, the veins of coal preserve above or below them, in shales that were once deposits of mud, the branching trunks of trees, perfectly fossilized. There are no better proofs of the vegetable origin of coal than the lumps themselves. But they are plain to the naked eye, while the coal tells its story to the man with the microscope. The fossil remains of the plants that flourished when coal was forming are gigantic, compared with plants of the same families now living. We must conclude that the climate was tropical, the air very heavy with moisture, and charged much more heavily than it is now with carbonic acid gas. These conditions produced, in rapid succession, forests of tree ferns and horsetails and giant club mosses. These are the three types of plants out of which the coal was made. They were all rich in resin, which makes the coal burn readily. The ferns had stems as large as tree trunks. Some have been found that are eighteen inches in diameter. We know they are ferns, because the leaves are found with their fruits attached to them in the manner of present-day ferns. The stems show the well known scar by which fern leaves are joined. And the wood of these fossil fern stems is tubular in structure, just as the wood of living ferns is to-day.