MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 21 



Thirdly, we should put the produce to such good use that we may have 

 somethiug to show for the exhausted resources. In particular, then, we 

 should see that so far as possible substitutes are devised aud developed. 



Now to illustrate the kind of knowledge we should have. 



Our marl or boglime beds, which have been used as the base for 

 cement factories have been produced in the past few thousand years, but 

 the lake alga' and shells are still busy abstracting lime from the hard 

 water. One thing which it would be interesting to know is how fast our 

 marl beds are growing and how many acres of pond and bog and cubic 

 yards of boglime a company should have, so that when they got around 

 they could begin over again. The state might well encourage such an 

 investigation and also see how fast it could be accumulated by the fittest 

 plants. In the same way with our peat bogs. If peat comes to be a 

 popular fuel, and I believe it will, it Avill at first be mainly on accumu- 

 lated peat that we shall draw, but it will also be worth while to know 

 how fast a bog can be made to grow and whether its growth can be 

 stimulated by changes in water level or encouraging appropriate plants. 

 I believe the layers showing the annual rate of increase of depth are in 

 some bogs from an inch in depth near the top to one-twentieth of an 

 inch at the bottom, or say 182 to 3630 cubic feet per acre per year, or 

 between 25 and 50 tons of fuel value per acre. In this case and probably 

 also that of the marl or boglime, it may be only the accumulated stock 

 that can practically be counted as wealth. I would suggest it as a 

 good reason for the commonwealth's economic policy that scientific re- 

 search be endowed on just these grounds, that when our present coal 

 mines are exhausted we may know where most readily to find new, and 

 when these in turn are but hollow voids some inventor shall have found a 

 storage battery that will turn Ariel from a tricksy sprite to a mighty 

 genius of work and make the windmill as much a source of power as the 

 water wheel. 



A Frenchman has recently suggested setting a coal mine on fire and 

 pumping down just enough air to make water gas and then burning this 

 gas as it comes to the surface. If this idea proves feasible it would add 

 untold millions to the wealth of this state in seams which it would not 

 now pay to burn. But in any case by the time our earlier sources of 

 power, lumber waste and coal, are exhausted, we may discover oil and 

 gas. or use our water powers to develop electric heat or grow our own 

 fuel either as four-foot wood or as peat, whichever shall be proven by 

 scientific ex])eriment to be the most economical and be ready with our 

 streams already dammed and copper cables covering the land to furnish 

 more power from water than we now use from coal. 



So, again, little by little the unfertilized farm will become less fertile, 

 for in spite of all the care and skill of the Michigan farmer the wheat 

 product per acre of the lower four tiers of counties of Michigan does not 

 bear the same ratio to that of the- state that it once did.^ It is well worth 



lAvERAGE YiE/.P PER AcRE OP WheAT IN MICHIGAN. 



