252 THE GROWTH OF COAL 



you will find a use for it.' She has kept her beds of coal for 

 millions of years without being able to find a use for them ; 

 she has sent them beneath the sea, and the sea beasts could 

 make nothing of them ; she had raised them up into dry land, 

 and laid the black veins bare, and still for ages and ages there 

 was no living thing on the face of the earth that could see any 

 sort of value in them ; and it was only the other day, so to 

 speak, that she turned a new creature out of her workshop, 

 who, by degrees, acquired sufficient wits to make a fire, and 

 then to discover that the black rock would burn. 



" I suppose that nineteen hundred years ago, when Julius 

 Caesar was good enough to deal with Britain as we have dealt 

 with New Zealand, the primaeval Briton, blue with cold and 

 woad, may have known that the strange black stone which he 

 found here and there in his wanderings would burn, and so 

 help to warm his body and cook his food. Saxon, Dane, and 

 Norman swarmed into the land. The English people grew 

 into a powerful nation ; and Nature still waited for a return 

 for the capital she had invested in ancient club mosses. The 

 eighteenth century arrived, and with it James Watt. The 

 brain of that man was the spore out of which was developed 

 the steam engine, and all the prodigious trees and branches 

 of modern industry which have grown out of this. But coal 

 is as much an essential of this growth and development as 

 carbonic acid is of a club moss. Wanting the coal, we could 

 not have smelted the iron needed to make our engines ; nor 

 have worked our engines when we got them. But take away 

 the engines, and the great towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire 

 vanish like a dream. Manufactures give place to agriculture 

 and pasture, and not ten men could live where now ten thou- 

 sand are amply supported. 



" Thus all this abundant wealth of money and of vivid life 

 is Nature's investment in . club mosses and the like so long 

 ago. But what becomes of the coal which is burnt in yielding 



