I am only a pebble, as you know, and so I am not able to move around whenever I get the notion. But as time passed, the waters in which I had lain for millions of years got lower and my home became a marshy swamp. Then insects brought news of other regions.
One day, a creature unlike any I'd ever seen came crawling clumsily along and not only stepped all over me but scuffed me out of the mud in which I was partly buried. Then, without a word of apology, he sat down right on top of me. That was about 250 million years ago and I still hadn't learned to control my temper.
"Say! What do you think you're doing! I shouted at him." You should have seen the fellow jump.
"I'm very sorry, but I just didn't see you." he murmured shyly. "I'm so tired that I'm afraid I wasn't looking where I was going."
He certainly seemed like a nice fellow although he wasn't very attractive. He was a lizard-like creature, very much like a salamander but quite a bit bigger. I was sorry almost at once that I had been so short with him and apologized for my bad temper.
"You must have come a long way to be so tired!" I remarked in a friendly way.
"Yes, indeed, at least fifty miles." he said. "But I think I will turn around and go back again. I'm lonesome already for my old home."
Then he began to tell me about the beautiful swamp where he lived. Just imagine a huge, steaming forest in a great bog. There were no colors except shades of brown and green, for there were no flowers then. Great insects buzzed and hummed among the trees and other fern-like plants, and lizard-like animals basked in the warm mud and slithered among the giant stems. Except for these, no sounds were heard but the swishing of the wind through the trees.
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| "Then insects brought news of other regions." |
Some of the trees towered to heights of one hundred feet, and yet these giants of the past are ancestors of the club moss, a little plant that, today, is just a few inches high. These trees had leaves set closely together, covering their trunks. When the leaves fell off, the surface of the trunk was left covered with markings like the scales on a snakeskin.
The insects, too, were enormous. There were dragonflies over two feet long from wing-tip to wing-tip and cockroaches up to four inches long and in hundreds of different varieties. It's probably a lucky thing there weren't any people living at this time!
How big the forms of life grew in the tropical climate and how fast! They almost choked each other out of place. After the great trees died, they would fall beneath the swamp water and pile up on the muddy bottom. The water protected them from the bacteria in the air, which would have caused them to decay. Because of this, instead of rotting away, the trees were changed into a substance called peat. Peat is used in some parts of the world for fuel.
During a hundred years in such a swamp forest enough dead plants collected at the bottom of the swamp to make one foot of peat. Then, during the millions of years following, the peat might be pressed together and changed in other ways to form coal. About twenty feet of this soft peat fuel would be needed to press down into one foot of hard coal. It isn't strange, then, to think that it took millions of years to make the thick coal beds of Illinois. I wonder if my friendly visitor ever got back to his beloved bog. If he did, I'm sure he'd have liked nothing better than to become fossilized in the coal beds, just exactly like some of his relatives.
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