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Seams of coal are sometimes fifty or more feet thick.
No forest could make such a layer of coal; it is estimated
that it would take a twelve-foot layer of peat deposit to
make a layer of coal one foot thick; and twelve feet of
peat deposit would require plant remains a hundred and
twenty feet high. How tall and thick must a forest be,
then, in order to create a seam of coal not one foot thick
but fifty? The plant remains must be six thousand feet
thick. In some places there must have been fifty to a
hundred successive huge forests, one replacing the other,
since so many seams of coal are formed. But it is further
questionable whether the forests grew one on top of the
other, because a coal bed, undivided on one side, some-
times splits on the other side into numerous beds, with
layers of limestone or other formations between.
http://www.archive.org/stream/earthupheaval010880mbp/earthupheaval010880mbp_djvu.txt