558 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



Concentration in special areas of settlement, formerly chiefly ef- 

 fected for military reasons, has in modem times been determined 

 more and more by the distribution of supplies of energy. The posi- 

 tion of the manufacturing district is primarilj'^ determined by the 

 vsupply of coal. Other forms of energy are, no doubt, available, but, 

 as Sir William Ramsay showed in his presidential address at the 

 Portsmouth meeting in 1911, we must in all probability look to coal 

 as being the diief permanent source. 



In the early days of manufacturing industries the main difficulties 

 arose from defective land transport. The first growth of the indus- 

 trial system, therefore, took place where sea transport was relatively 

 easy; raw material produced in a region near a coast was carried 

 to a coal field also near a coast, just as in the times when military 

 power was chiefly a matter of " natural defenses," the center of 

 power and the food-producing colony had to be mutually accessible. 

 Hence the Atlantic took the place of the Mediterranean, Great 

 Britain eventually succeeded Rome, and eastern North America 

 became the counterpart of Northern Africa. It is to this, perhaps 

 more than to anything else, that we in Britain owe our tremendous 

 start amongst the industrial nations, and we observe that we used 

 it to provide less favored nations with the means of improving their 

 system of land transport, as well as actually to manufacture imported 

 raw material and redistribute the products. 



But there is, of course, this difference between the supply of food- 

 stuff' (or even military power) and mechanical energy, that in the 

 case of coal at least it is necessary to live entirely upon capital; the 

 storing up of energy in new coal fields goes on so slowly in compari- 

 son with our rate of expenditure that it may be altogether neglected. 

 Now, in this country we began to use coal on a large scale a little 

 more than a centurj^ ago. Our present yearly consumption is of the 

 order of 300,000,000 tons, and it is computed ^ that at the present 

 rate of increase " the whole of our available suppl}'^ will be exhausted 

 in 170 years." With regard to the rest of the world we can not, 

 from lack of data, make even the broad assumptions that were pos- 

 sible in the case of wheat supply, and for that and other reasons it is 

 therefore impossible even to guess at the time which must elapse 

 before a universal dearth of coal becomes imminent; it is perhaps 

 sufficient to observe that to the best of our knowledge and belief one 

 of the world's largest groups of coal fields (our own) is not likely 

 to last three centuries in all. 



Here again the present interest lies rather in the phases of change 

 which are actually with us. During the first stages of the manufac- 

 turing period energy in any form was exceedingly difficult to trans- 



1 General Report of the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies, 1906, 



