no 



NATURE 



[March 25, 1920 



direct financial loss. The coal industry can be 

 conducted on those lines in accordance with three 

 possible policies — nationalisation, one coal trust 

 for all the British fields, or group working by 

 a combine for each coal field, co-ordinated by 

 national control. Which of these policies is best 

 is not a geological question. The problem for 

 geologists is whether one of these policies is neces- 

 sary at once, owing to the diminution of our coal 

 reserves. The recent rise in the price of coal has 

 been due partly to a just increase in miners' 

 wages, partly to the higher costs of supplies, and 

 partly to some spontaneous hypertrophy of 

 price in distribution. Compared with these influ- 

 ences, the contribution to the soaring of coal prices 

 by the geological factors is trivial. The conditions 

 of our coal supplies do not render immediately 

 necessary any drastic action in the conduct of the 

 industry. In countries such as India, where the 

 total coal reserves relative to the area and popula- 

 tion are small, nationalisation may be the soundest 

 economic policy, but we are far from the time 

 when the three great coal-producing countries — 

 the United Kingdom, the United States, and 



Germany — will find nationalisation necessary 

 owing to the approaching exhaustion of their coal 

 supplies. 



The direct issue before the nation at present is 

 between national ownership of the minerals with 

 centralised Government control of mining — which 

 may give us the drawbacks of nationalisation 

 without its advantages, and is repudiated by both 

 the miners and the mine owners— and a scheme 

 of nationalisation combined with local administra- 

 tion of the industry by those engaged in it. The 

 issue between nationalisation and the pre-war 

 system may not be put to the nation unless as a 

 result of the conflict between the nationalisers who 

 advocate central control and those who advocate 

 local control. The pre-war system has no chance 

 of permanence unless developed to give the miners 

 better conditions and a share in the control and 

 financial fluctuations of the industry, combined 

 with regulations to enforce economy in the use of 

 coal and to secure less waste in mining, and with 

 the determination of the extent of the concealed 

 coal fields on which the future of the country will 

 ultimately depend. 



Obituary. 



Prof. Charles Lapworth, F.R.S. 



T^HE work of Prof. Charles Lapworth (who 

 *• died on Saturday, March 13) in the sciences 

 of geology and geography will continue to influ- 

 ence and inspire the growth of these sciences for 

 many years to come. At the moment we can but 

 mourn the loss of one worthy to be classed with 

 the greatest of the old masters. 



Gifted with a vivid and flexible imagination 

 which he kept In his most brilliant excursions well 

 under the control of his data, with unwearied 

 patience in the collection of fact by his own 

 observation or that of others, with an active and 

 most orderly mind for grouping and arranging 

 ideas, with the moral courage to hold his hypo- 

 theses in test until the survivors of them became 

 proved theories, with a perfect genius for strati- 

 graphy, an instinct for geometry, and the hand 

 of an artist, Lapworth had the qualities requisite 

 to bring the study of the older palaeozoic rocks 

 to the level of an exact science, to throw new 

 light on the mechanism of earth-movement, and 

 to forge the links between geology, "the geo- 

 graphy of the past," and the geography of the 

 present. 



In 1864 Lapworth grasped the opportunity of 

 work in the Southern Uplands, the country redo- 

 lent of Scott, his favourite author. Spending 

 €very leisure moment in walking over ground 

 thus made sacred to him, and possessing the gift 

 of close and accurate observation, he could not 

 help becoming interested In the landscape and the 

 rocks ; and he soon found himself studying the 

 geology of the region in company with his friend 

 James Wilson. 



NO. 2630, VOL. 105] 



It happened that the landscape of this area 

 concealed under an aspect of simplicity, but 

 revealed to the eye of genius, a rock-structure 

 of extraordinary complexity, to which there was 

 apparently no clue except a few obscure pen-like 

 markings, called graptolites, in the Moffat shales ; 

 and these had been tried for the purpose, but 

 " turned down " as useless. Lapworth, however, 

 determined to give them a second chance, and, as 

 a result of systematic collecting, a keen eye for a 

 country, and a retentive memory for minute, but 

 significant, llthological variation, accompanied by 

 a more elaborate piece otf geological mapping than 

 his predecessors had ever attempted, succeeded in 

 proving that they could be used to unravel a rock- 

 succession, even though it was more crumpled, 

 inverted, and tangled than any other then known. 



The rock succession and tectonic structure thus 

 made out were tested against the simpler succes- 

 sion and relations and the more normal fossils of 

 the Girvan area, and proved correct. At the same 

 time, the graptolite zones that Lapworth had 

 established were tested by comparison with suc- 

 cessions made out partly by others, but mainly 

 by himself at home, and by workers in Scan- 

 dinavia, Bohemia, etc., proving that he had suc- 

 cessfully performed at Moffat the double feat of 

 working out the succession by means of the 

 structure, and the structure by the succession. 



The correct reading of the Uplands having shown 

 that an apparently simple upward succession 

 might be altogether misleading, and that this region 

 gave support, and not contradiction, to general 

 laws previously established in the organic and 



