Coal Black Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

Canadian Biography.
“Thus his enthusiasm saw in every galena vein or coal seam a lead mine or a coal field.”) By 1842 the man who would later usher in the modern petroleum industry was just about broke. In desperation, he opened a museum that included his vast collection of minerals, fossils and wildlife specimens. It failed. Gesner’s creditors took over his fabled collection, in lieu of payment.
    All of which is to say that Gesner may have been overjoyed at the distraction of playing tour guide for an illustrious guest anxious to see the fossil cliffs of Joggins. Sir Charles Lyell—bony of visage and possessing the visionary’s thousand-mile stare—was on a side trip during his first visit to the United States and the British province of Canada. At almost forty-five, the most famous scientist in the English-speaking world was near the pinnacle of his career. Nine years earlier he had published the first edition of his seminal book,
Principles of Geology: being an inquiry how far the former changes of the earths surface are referable to causes now in operation
—which, more than any other work, had defined geology as a science.
    By 1842, Lyell was smack dab in the middle of one of the great scientific/religious debates of the millennium: how old is the earth? Before the nineteenth century there was still relative unanimity in the Eastern, Christian world that God had created the world in six days. Then heretical new theories began to appear: that the earth was the result of a collision between a comet and the sun, or had condensed over eons from a cooling gas cloud. By the time Lyell arrived in Nova Scotia, the debate within the scientific community had hardened into two distinct camps. On one side were the “catastrophists,” who believed that earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods or other calamities were responsible for the formation of the world’s surface. On the other side stood the “uniformitarians,” of whose cause Lyell was the world’s leading proponent.
    Lyell’s view can be boiled down to his famous dictum “The present is the key to the past.” Or, to put it another way, the earth’s crust changes now for the same reasons and at the same rate as it always has. And geological changes are the steady accumulation of minute changes over enormously long spans of time—not the result of some calamity sent by a righteous God. By 1842 this wasn’t the prevailing scientific view—far from it—so Lyell was forever searching for proof. Which brought him to Nova Scotia.
    Lyell had another equally weighty question on his mind when he arrived in nearby Parrsboro to meet Gesner: what exactly was coal? Strange to think that on something so fundamental—the nature of the mineral fuelling the Industrial Revolution that was then transforming the world—there was no consensus. Many, including a young naturalist named Charles Darwin, thought the shiny black rock that extended for miles and miles must have formed in the onlysuitably vast location on the planet: under the sea. Two years earlier a Canadian geologist named William Logan had presented a paper that had knocked the scientific world for a loop; coal beds he had examined in South Wales were persistently underlaid with a layer of clay containing numerous fossil tree roots. In 1841 Logan had travelled to Pennsylvania and Joggins and found the same plant roots that were present in Wales. In his view, those were the roots of landlocked plant matter that was the source of the coal beds.
    Lyell came to Joggins to see for himself. “I was particularly desirous, before I left England of examining the numerous fossil trees alluded to by Dr. Gesner as imbedded in an upright posture at many levels in the cliffs of the South Joggins,” he wrote in
Travels in North America,
his book about the journey.
    I felt convinced that, if I could verify the account of which I had read, of the superposition of so many different tiers of trees, each representing forests