59 



Not content with his dostriiction of the natural beauty of the surface 

 of the State, he has delved deep into its depths, in search of those riches 

 of stored power, there hidden since the sun gave up its heat and light to 

 the plant cells of the old Silurian seas and Carboniferous marshes. With 

 his iron drill he sunk, in eighteen years, ten thousand vents to the 

 Trenton rock. Through these there poured natural gas valued, even at 

 the extremely low price at which it was sold, at .$77,018,189. So greedy 

 was he, so ignorant of the real value of this gaseous fuel and the manner 

 of its formation, so reckless in its consumption, that at the end of less 

 than a score of years there remains only the dregs of the plenty that 

 has been. 



As with natural gas, so with its mother liquid, crude petroleum. 

 Since 1891, 16,975 bores have been sunk within the limits of the State, 

 for it alone. Through these 55,172,755 barrels of oil, valued at $42,757,- 

 834, have reached the surface. But few years will elapse before the 

 stored supply of it, too, will have vanished. A priceless gift of nature — 

 hundreds of millions of years in forming — it will be sacrificed to the 

 greed of the white man in less than the life of a generation of his kind. 



More valuable than either gas or oil, closer to the surface and, there- 

 fore, more easily seciired, are those vast veins of coal which vuiderlie 

 the southwestern area of our State. For sixty years man has sunk his 

 shafts and pitholes to their levels, and tunneled miles along their courses, 

 until the output has risen above nine million tons per annum. Less than 

 two centuries will see the end of this stored fuel, and Indiana will then 

 have been raped of all those riches which, in the ages past, were formed 

 beneath her surface. 



But why continue? Examples manifold could yet be given of the 

 changes wrought by man since first he gave the name Indiana to the 

 area in which we dwell— changes which one and all have but marred the 

 face of nature and left everywhere the signs of his greed, his egoism. 

 Only the great blue ethereal dome — the sun which shines and riiles over 

 all— the moon, cold and lifeless — the stars, gleaming from their heights in 

 the realms of space — the clouds which oftentimes hide even these from 

 vie"w — seem as they were when the Indiana of Nature was first perfected. 



