pg. 27

One point upon which Moses and all the scientists agree is that animal life originated in the water, and developed there for untold time before it appeared upon the land; and with different environment took on different forms. While these forms were developing in the water, in the warm, steaming, half-light on land great beds of mosses, marsh plants, and gigantic ferns fifty feet in height and with wide-spreading branches were growing. As the light grew stronger these fibrous growths fell before it, and succeeding ages covered them with upheavals from the waters, washing from the mountains, and the eternal sifting that we poetically call "star dust."

At first thought this would seem to form no considerable portion of the earth's surface, but when we remember that from the draft of a vessel sailing the ocean for a thousand miles an average of sixty-three barrels of dust can be swept, we realize that, although imperceptible to us, star dust is a factor in surface formation. Now we are digging these buried growths from where we consider "the bowels of the earth," in a hardened state we call coal, and burning it for fuel, but the leaves and mosses that come to light imprinted or petrified upon it prove that once they were upon the surface.

From Moses and the Origin of Life