much as possible in order to lessen the quantity, the exact requirements for energetic putrefaction will be provided. Dilution below a cer tain point is adverse to putrefaction; that dilution will at present be the general state of the sewage, but with the separate sewering plan it will be the exception, and the putrefactive process will have full play.' The question of the duration of our coalfields is, as we have stated at the beginning of this article, gravely discussed at the present time by persons who have studied the geology of Great Britain, and have watched the enormous drain upon our collieries in late years. Of course complete and absolute exhaustion of our coal must come, it is only a matter of time. Such an obvious proposition as this might seem superfluous, but it may not be so; for only a few years since it is reported that the foremost statesman of the day believed in the growth or reproduction of coal! Coal once gone is gone for ever, so far as we are concerned. The carbonic acid gas which it produces on combustion may serve as food for plants in this and other parts of the world, and so its carbon, by the agency of sun force, may again be deposited in a form available for fuel. But, notwithstanding what Lyell may propound, it is certain that no flora now exists in any part of the world, either in kind or luxuriance of growth, like that which formed the coal of the carboniferous system. of the Exchequer may have preached to the contrary when he brought in the Electoral Franchise Bill. The estimation of our residual resources of coal, with any approximation to trustworthiness, is an exceedingly difficult problem. Much coal, as in South Wales, lies so deep that it is doubtful whether it will ever be accessible to man, on account of the great increase of temperature at great depths, the expense, and other obvious circumstances. The loss from the occurrence of faults, and the ruinous expense of contending against water, are elements, and important ones, too, not to be neglected in this consideration. We must not be misled by that transparent and mischievous fallacy which was imposed upon the House of Commons on the occasion of the French Treaty, namely, of taking the aggregate thickness of all the beds of coal in the series, and regarding all as equally workable with profit, whereas any person having the smallest practical acquaintance with collieries knows perfectly that many beds are so thin or so inferior in quality that they are, and ever will be, utterly worthless, unless the price of coal should advance far beyond all expectation. Mr. Jevons has, we think, fairly examined this question of exhaustion, which he seems to think is not extremely remote. We may here remark that the book of this author well deserves attentive perusal, and that the Coal Question' in its various aspects is treated with care and judgment; but we also think that he has committed the error of not sufficiently discriminating with respect to the value of the opinions of persons whom he cites as authorities. Nevertheless his book is a good one, and we can with confidence recommend it. But on Sir William Armstrong in his Address, which, as President, he delivered before the British Association at Newcastle-onTyne in 1863, uttered a mournful, yet salutary, warning as to the end of our coal; and we believe that he spoke the truth, and that the end is much nearer than is commonly supposed. Nations, like individuals, when overflowing with wealth, are too apt We shall not venture in this article to to be reckless as well as lavish, and to go on commit ourselves to any definite numerical scattering their resources broadcast, until statement, either as to the quantity of coal they suddenly find themselves ruined be- which may remain to be gotten, or to the yond hope of redemption. Thus have we time when exhaustion will occur. sinned with regard to our coal- that match- this point we would press upon the attenless reservoir of force-and thus shall we tion of Government the following suggesfall from our high estate if we proceed in tion. The Geological Survey of Great our mad career of waste and extravagance. Britain and Ireland is being actively conProphets have arisen proclaiming the end ducted at the national expense. It is under to be far distant and our apprehensions un- the direction of Sir Roderick Murchison, founded, but they present no credentials and is carried on by well-trained and trustworthy of acceptance. We flatter our worthy practical geologists. The mineral selves that the coal will last our time, and statistics of the country are yearly collected so it will; but men who are susceptible of by the same Institution, and published in a patriotism look forward with reasonable compendious and most useful form. Sir anxiety to the future of their country. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof' is not their creed, whatever the Chancellor Roderick, it is well known, has, in spite of his pet Siluria, devoted great attention to the Carboniferous system. About a year ago, in a public speech, he confidently predicted a considerable extension of the coalfield in Nottinghamshire, and has thereby raised the hopes, or, it may be, fears, of many landed proprietors of that county. We would advise that Sir Roderick should be officially instructed to collect all possible evidence bearing upon this question, and present a well-digested report thereon for our guidance. We do not want the individual opinion of this or that person, founded, perhaps, on very insufficient data, or on no data at all worthy of the name; but what we do want is such information as the Geological Survey ought to be able, and would no doubt be willing, to supply, and which at the present time would be most valuable and opportune. so condensed, so available, and so easily transported where it may be required. Mr. Jevons states the truths clearly in the following passage: seams : 'Coal has all the characteristics which entitle it to be considered the best natural source of motive power. It is like a spring, wound up during geological ages for us to let down. Just as in alluvial deposits of gold-dust we enjoy the labour of the natural forces which for ages were breaking down the quartz veins and washing out the gold ready for us, so in our we have peculiar stores of force collected from the sunbeams for us. Coal contains light and heat, bottled up in the earth, as Stephenson said, for tens of thousands of years, and now again brought forth and made to work for human purposes. The amount of power contained in coal is almost incredible. In burning a single pound of coal, there is force developed equivalent to that of 11,422,000 lbs. weight falling one foot, and the actual useful force got from each pound of coal in a good steam-engine is that of 1,000,000 lbs. falling through a foot; that is to say, there is spring. enough in coal to raise a million times its own weight a foot high. Or again, suppose a farmer to despatch a horse and cart to bring a ton of coals to work a portable engine, occupying four hours on the way, the power brought in the coal is 2800 times the power expended in bringing it; and the amount of useful force actually got from it will probably exceed by ed in the cart. In coal we pre-eminently have, 100 times or more that of the horse as employas the partner of Watt said, "What all the world wants,-POWER." All things considered, it is not reasonable to suppose or expect that the power of coal will ever be superseded by anything better. It is naturally the best source of power, as air and water and gold and iron are, each for its purposes, the most useful of substances, and such as will never be superseded.'-p. 141. We know men highly educated after the usual fashion in everything except physical science, and men too in a commanding position either to instruct or mislead the public mind, who fancy that a substitute will be found for coal. In the first place, they forget that for our purposes it would not be sufficient that a mere substitute should be found. To enable Britain to maintain her place among the nations, she should have as peculiar advantages in respect of the supposed new fuel as she now possesses in respect of coal. But to return to our speculators. They point to the wondrous inventions which in our time have proceeded from the brain of man and they argue that, as our ancestors had not the faintest notion of the possibility of such achievements, so there may still be occult powers in nature hereafter to be revealed of which we have no conception. Hence they rashly jump to the conclusion that the power now supplied by coal will in future be derived from another source. Now, if we examine the nature of the achievements above referred to - for example, steam-navigation, railway- Much interest has been excited in the travelling, and the electric telegraph - we public mind concerning the recent discoveshall find that they consist not in the discov-ries of very large accumulations of petroery of any new force, but simply in the leum in Canada and the United States. novel application of forces previously well This substance is a combustible mineral oil, known. Suffice it to add, that every day composed essentially of carbon and hydrostrengthens the conviction of those who are gen, which may be employed either as fuel spending their lives in the pursuit of science or for the purpose of illumination. Petro-or, what is equivalent, in searching out leum, or rock-oil, has long been known to the powers of nature that the idea of a occur in various parts of the world. It is substitute for coal or similar carbonaceous derived exclusively from vegetable or animatter, which is virtually accumulated sun- mal matter, and in many cases has certainly force, is indeed the baseless fabric of a been produced from coal by a natural pro vision.' Let us reflect for a moment upon cess of distillation. According to Professor that prodigious store of pent-up force which Lesley, of the United States, one of the may set free by the application of a tiny best authorities on the subject, rocks hold spark, and then try to conceive of the possi- it in three ways, by being more or less bility of any source of power so abundant, gravelly or porous throughout, by being cracked in cleavage planes throughout, and by being traversed by large fissures, which are probably all of them mere enlargements of racks along the cleavage planes. There are many scientific as well as economic considerations of great interest connected with petroleum which we cannot enter upon in this article. We have only to observe that quâ fuel we may virtually regard it in the same light as coal. Mr. Jevons says, 'What is petroleum but the essence of coal, distilled from it by terrestrial or artificial heat? Its natural supply is far more limited and uncertain than that of coal; its price is about 15l. per ton already, and an artificial supply can only be had by the distillation of some kind of coal at considerable cost. To extend the use of petroleum, then, is only a new way of pushing the consumption of coal. It is more likely to be an aggravation of the drain than a remedy' (p. 141). It should be stated, that geologists maintain, seemingly on good grounds, that the Canadian rock-oil is chiefly of animal origin.* Besides fuel, there are other supplies of sun-force at our command, namely, wind and water currents, which have long been employed as the motive powers in wind and water mills. The wind owes its motion to solar heat, and the water of every stream has been evaporated from the sea and subsequently condensed by the refrigeratory influence of the high land; so that the power in both cases may be correctly ascribed to the sun. In the ebb and flow of the tides there is vast expenditure of force, due mainly to the attraction of the moon; and in many localities it might be possible to apply this force to the movement of machinery. Reservoirs, for instance, might be constructed to receive the water at the flow and to turn mills at the ebb. Mr. Jevons records several examples of tidal mills, and makes the following remarks upon them, with which we agree:· 'Not long ago Sir Robert Kane, in his " Industrial Resources in Ireland," supposed tidalmills capable of supplying power to Ireland. Their direct application to machine labour is out of the question, on account of the periodical variation of the tides by day and night; but even if we used them to pump water for artificial water-power, the tendency of tidal docks and reservoirs to silt up is an insuperable objection in cost. Engineers, from the time of An interesting account of the mode of occurrence of petroleum in the eastern coal-field of Kentucky, by Mr. Lesley, will be found in the Proceedings of the American Philosophica Society for May, 1865. Brindley, have constantly found that there is nothing more nearly beyond the remedy of art than the silting up of harbours, docks, and reservoirs. The great new Birkenhead Docks are threatened with this evil, and a tidal-mill and reservoir constructed on the opposite side of the Mersey, about half a century ago, was soon abandoned for a similar reason.' — p. 136. Nothing can be cheaper or more available than water-power, where the supply is abundant and constant during the year; but, unfortunately, this is not the case in many situations where water-mills exist. But water-power is very local and in this country rare; and, it need hardly be observed, that if it had been the only natural motive power at our command, our manufacturing capabilities would have been exceedingly limited and our material prosperity, therefore, comparatively small. We have met with persons having a vague notion that electricity will, in some mysterious way, be economically employed to generate force; but they are ignorant of the fundamental fact, upon which we have insisted, that no creation of force occurs in this world, and that we can only develop electricity by the exercise of some other equivalent force. Tyndall, in the exuberance of philosophic fancy, has imagined the possibility of transferring heat from the burning sands of the Desert of Sahara to the ice-bound shores of Greenland. Gigantic thermo-electric batteries are to be placed in the desert, and the resulting electric currents conveyed, by insulated wires of metal, through the Atlantic Ocean; when at the end of their journey they will be transformed into heat, heat and electricity being forces reciprocally convertible. That dismal and unceasing complaint about the wrongs of Ireland has of late resounded loudly through the land. Englishmen and Scotchmen cheerfully accept the world as they find it, manfully struggle onwards, and die at peace with all mankind. Not so the Irish. What is the reason? Is there a grievance, and, if there be, what is it? It may be sentimental,' to adopt the phrase of Lord Clanricarde in the House of Lords the other night, and sentimental grievances are incurable, except by a natural process of exhaustion like the rinderpest. It may be tenant-right; but then it is Irish and not English landlords who are to blame. There is one cause of the condition of Ireland which the natives never seem to think of, and that is want of coal. There is Ireland, poor and complaining, a breakwater against the fury of the Atlantic waves, and Great Britain rich and happy The export of coal is a subject which demands grave consideration. In the French Treaty we ceded our right during its continuance to levy any export duty on coal shipped to France. Much was said in Parliament for and against that stipulation. Certain persons in the House of Commons, The two islands are severed only by St George's Channel, and whence this difference of fate? Irish emigrants flock to the United States and there prosper, on account of the demand for white labour, and, consequently, the high rate of wages. They quit their native land penniless and ragged, and in America they save money and live in comparative comfort. With characteristic and unreasoning impulse they attribute the change for the better to the virtues of a Republican Government, whereas it is obviously due to the state of the labour market. Irishmen see England and Scotland wealthy and prosperous beyond parallel, and they cannot understand why they should not be equally so. They blame the British Government for this inequality of lot, and width. Nobody who examined the rocks of these absurdly suppose they are the victims of in-hill-sides, and found in each case a succession of justice. No delusion can exceed that on which is founded the cry for Government encouragement of Irish manufactures; as though in these days of free trade it were possible to establish and carry on manufactories in localities where the conditions are unfavourable. In the North of Ireland certain branches of manufacture have taken root and thrive, because there the conditions are favourable. Ireland is for the most part exclusively a pastoral country, and no pastoral country can become as rich and prosperous in a material sense as a country which, like Great Britain, possesses vast stores of coal, or, in other words, of manufacturing power. It would seem that Irish wrongs are in part the result of a cruel theft which Nature herself committed at an extremely remote epoch; for there is reason to believe that coal was once deposited over a large part of Ireland and aftewards almost wholly washed away, or, as geologists would say, removed by denudation. This is the conclusion arrived at by one of our ablest practical geologists, Mr. Jukes, Director of the Irish Geological Survey.* The following is the evidence on which Mr. Jukes founds this conclusion: "The rocks which appear at the surface in Ireland are mostly those which lie below the coal-measures, a very large part of the country being occupied by the carboniferous limestone which lies next below the coal-measures. In several districts, however, the uppermost bed of carboniferous limestone is covered by the coal-measures, sometimes by a thickness of 2000 or 3000 feet of those beds. This takes place either, 1st, where the ground rises into hills; or, 2ndly, where the uppermost bed of limestone sinks below the surface; or, 3raly, where such a combination of internal structure and external form (No.1) combine to produce the effect. 'In the South of Ireland there are two principal coal measure areas, a large continuous one spreading from North Cork, through Kerry and Limerick, into Clare, and a smaller but richer area in Tipperary, Kilkenny, and Queen's County. The latter is divided into two coal-fields-that of Castlecomer and that of Killenaule-by the valley of the river Nore, which cuts deep enough into each side of the coal-measure-basin to expose the limestone below for a considerable distance, leaving only a narrow neck of coal-measures in the centre to connect the two areas into one. This area is surrounded by six or seven isolated patches of coal-measures of greater or less size, separated from the main area by valleys or low spaces of limestone-ground varying from half a mile to three or four miles in beds exactly corresponding through a thickness of It is obvious that the only rational way of accounting for these facts is to suppose that the whole area was at one time covered by coal-measures, nal force of disturbance, and more or less destroyed which were subsequently bent and broken by interby the external operation of denuding action, the parts now remaining being those which were spared by that action, in consequence of their being most removed from its operation. In proceeding from the South to the North of Ireland we traverse a great limestone plain till we again find (in Leitrim) hills of coal-measures resting on the limestone, which may similarly be shown to have been most probably connected origi nally with those of the South; so that there are good grounds for the belief that Ireland was at one time one great coal-measure area with mere coal-measures at wide intervals. islands of still older rocks standing up through the 'It appears, also, that the lower part of these coal-measures, say the lowest two thousand feet of them next to the limestone, were very poor in coals, the lowest thousand feet having no coal at all, and that beds of good coal, with a workable thickness of from 4 feet to 6 feet, did not occur below a level of 2600 feet above the top of the limestone. 'Such beds of coal are found in little isolated basins where that thickness of coal-measures is brought into the ground, and render their former extension over much larger areas extremely probable. This denudation and destruction of coal-producing rocks is not recent, for an examination of the. geological structure of Antrim and its borders shows that it had been already largely carried out before the Permian and Triassic periods. 'Nature herself, therefore, began to impoverish Ireland even at so early a period as the Palæozoic epoch, and has done very little since to compensate her for this harsh usage. * who were largely concerned in Welsh Collieries, naturally spoke strongly in favour of it, urging as one ground the usual nonsense about the practical inexhaustibility of our coal-fields. It is neither unreasonable nor uncharitable to suppose that the judgment of men is liable to be warped when their personal advantage is at stake. In the House of Peers Lord Overstone contended 'that an export duty on a commodity of peculiar value and limited supply, like coal, may be an advantageous and legitimate source of revenue.' To this it is replied that an export duty on coal would be virtually a tax upon outward tonnage and therefore a discouragement of navigation. It would, doubtless, be difficult to levy such a duty so as not to injure or in convenience our shipping interest. Again, it may be asked whether the coal which we sell to foreigners will not bring more gain to the nation in the end than if it were allowed to remain for a long period underground. We have not, however, space at our disposal to enable us to examine this highly important problem of political economy. If they who framed the French Treaty had been as well informed and as much interested in the coal and iron trades as in those of cotton and calico, we should not have been outwitted as we have been with respect to both. The quantity of coal sent to France may be comparatively small, but what then if the policy be wrong in principle? Many statesmen of the present day seem disposed to ignore principle altogether in the matter of legislation, and to be swayed by the fear of noisy and mischievous demagogues of the hour rather than influenced by a patriotic regard either for the present or for the future welfare of their country. We cannot refrain from noticing in this article one point which concerns every inhabitant of London and the surrounding country within a circle of which the centre is the General Post Office and the length of the radius twenty miles we allude to the coal-tax, an impost of which the lamentable history will be found in the pamphlets, of which the titles are given at the head of this article; and they are well deserving of perusal at the present time, when Bills have just been brought into the House of Commons by the Metropolitan Board of Works for the Thames Embankment (North) Approaches and Park Lane Improvement. It is proposed to carry out these works with money borrowed on the security of The The Coal Question,' p. 330. Thames Embankment and Metropolis Improvement Fund,' established out of the proceeds of the taxes raised under the 'London Coal and Wine Duties Act, 1863,' which will not expire until July 5th, 1882. By this Act every ton of coal which enters the metropolitan area contained within a circuit of twenty miles in a direct line from the General Post Office, whether brought by canals, railways, or the Thames, pays a duty of somewhat more than a shilling, or more than twice the amount of royalty which many proprietors of coal receive. How at this period of commercial freedom and abolition of excise duties the manufacturers of London should tolerate such an imposition is extraordinary. Such a tax is a matter of serious consideration where the consumption of coal is very large, as in many establishments within the metropolitan area. We believe it to be wrong in principle, and condemn it accordingly. We should be sorry to be hampered with the French octroi system in London. We are in favour of all reasonable Metropolitan improvements, and we know that for such purposes money must be forthcoming; but let it be levied by rates upon property, like the sewers' and other rates. What can be more anomalous than to allow the French to have our coal duty free, while not a pound of the same coal can be consumed in London and the vicinity without having paid a tax? Good British coal may even be purchased on the West Coast of South America for about 21. per ton, or only about a third more than the London price. Surely coal is sufficiently taxed before it reaches us. In conclusion, we may observe that there is plenty of coal in the world, however soon our own may come to an end. The largest coal-field in the world is that of the United States. There is excellent coal in Nova Scotia. From Brazil we have received samples of coal, apparently of the carboniferous system, but much of it is worthless from the presence of pyrites in large quantity. We have examined the lignites of Trinidad, some of which are of good quality, and one variety closely resembles carboniferous coal in composition as well as appearance. There is lignite even on Desolation Island in the South Pacific Ocean, but it is comparatively worthless from its being seamed, remarkable to say, with a zeoliti mineral. The lignite of New Zealand is a valuable fuel. There is carboniferous coal in Borneo and Australia. We have referred to the coal-field of China. There are copious deposits of lignite in Europe, as in Bo h |