GOD IN NATURE I?9 



for them ; she has sent them beneath the sea, and the sea- 

 beasts could make nothing of them ; she has 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 primeval 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 whicn 

 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 roal, 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 thousand 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 the interest ? Heat comes out of it, light comes 



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