Carbon composing a peat bed is simply unconsumed carbon. The carbon or smoke that arises from every chimney and furnace when measurably shut up from immediate union with oxygen, remains an unburnt fuel precisely the same in kind as the unburnt carbon fuel of the peat bogs. Were we to collect the unburnt carbon from our chimneys in piles, where moisture and air could have free access, it would take fire spontaneously and burn, just as peat dug from the bog sometimes takes fire and burns. The millions of fires from foundries, volcanoes, etc., are forming fuel wherever soot is formed, and were it not for the ever active oxygen of the air, it would all descend upon the earth as fuel and become incorporated in forming sedimentary beds. This is our claim for the coal, which as unconsumed carbon arose beyond the reach of destroying oxygen, from the heated, glowing furnace of our globe, and in time returned to the earth. When the plant dies and begins to decay one of its constituent elements, carbon, oxydizes by slow combustion and returns to the air as an invisible gas. It is but accidental when a particle fails to become oxydized and remains as unconsumed carbon. An exceedingly small part of vegetation remains unburnt. Coal veins, which are from one foot to three hundred feet thick, would make a stratum around the earth ten feet thick. Fifty pounds of coal will yield 10,000 gallons of carbonic acid. Then calling eight gallons equal to one cubic foot the astonishing fact comes out that the coal beds actually draw from the atmosphere an ocean of carbonic acid which would have covered the globe to the depth of 12,500 feet, which would have destroyed all animal life. Even three or four per cent. of carbonic acid in our present atmosphere would be fatal to animal life. Hence it is clear that coal cannot be attributed to vegetable origin. CONCLUSIONS REACHED. The following conclusions are clearly deducible: 1. The Annular system was a region of microscopic life and infusorial forms. Coal being deposited by sea-water carried down with it marine forms, and others settled upon its surface. 2. The carbon deposits must have borne down a vast amount of marine vegetation and buried it upon the sea bottom. In swamp marshes the vegetation would have been entirely different. 3. When a carbon fall was borne to the seas and settled where limestone strata prevailed it would indicate great distance from the shore, and here the roof shales of the coal must be necessarily free from land fossils. Coal beds amongst sandstone strata indicate depositions near shore, and may contain land fossils. 4. The coal beds must be more heavily developed toward polar regions, and most free from impurities. 5. All carbon downfalls must have been attended by great cataclysms of snow, or water, or both.