September 17, 1903] 



NATURE 



487 



its margins where the great routes of ocean transport con- 

 verge, or where the sea penetrates far in towards the 

 industrial regions. 



It has been the good fortune of this country to be the 

 first to realise, and with characteristic energy to take 

 advantage of, the new possibilities for development opened 

 up by the discovery and utilisation of its mineral wealth. 

 We were e.xceedingly fortunate in having so much of this 

 wealth at hand, easy to get and work from geological con- 

 siderations, cheap to transport and export from geographical 

 considerations. So we were able to pay cash for the pro- 

 ducts of the whole world, to handle, manufacture, and 

 transport them, and thus to become the traders and carriers 

 of the world. 



But other nations are waking up. We have no monopoly 

 of underground wealth, and day by day we are feeling the 

 competition of their awakening strength. Can we carry 

 on the straggle and maintain the lead we have gained? 



In answering this question there are three great con- 

 siderations to keep in mind. First, our own mineral wealth 

 is unexhausted ; secondly, that of our colonies is as yet 

 almost untouched ; and thirdly, there are still many un- 

 colonised areas left in the world. 



The very plenty of our coal and iron, and the ease of 

 extracting it, has been an economic danger. There has 

 been waste in exploration because of ignorance of the 

 structure and position of the coal-yielding rocks ; waste in 

 extraction because of defective appliances, of the working 

 only of the best-paying seams and areas, of the water 

 difliculty, and the want of well-kept plans and records of 

 areas worked and unworked ; waste in employment because 

 of the low efficiency of the machinery which turns this 

 energy into work. With all this waste our coalfields have" 

 hardly yielded a miserable one per cent, of the energy which 

 the coal actually possesses when in situ. 



Engineers and miners are trying to diminish two of these 

 sources of waste, and Geology has done something to re- 

 duce that of exploration. This has been done by detailed 

 mapping and study, so that we now know the areas covered 

 by the coal-seams, their varying thickness, the " wants," 

 folds, and faults by which they are traversed, and all that 

 great group of characters designated as the geological 

 structure of the coalfields. It could not have been accom- 

 plished unless unproductive as well as productive areas had 

 been studied, the margins of the fields mapped as well as 

 their interiors, and unless the geological principles wrested 

 from all sorts of rocks and regions had been available for 

 application to the coal districts in question. We no longer 

 imagine every grey shale to be an index of coal ; we are 

 not frightened by every roll or fault we meet with under- 

 giound; nor do we, as in the past, throw away vast sums 

 of money in sinking for coal in Cambrian or Silurian 

 rocks. 



We cannot afford, hard bitten as we are in the rough 

 school of experience and with our increased knowledge, 

 to make all the old mistakes over again, and yet we are 

 on the very eve of doing it. Up to the present it is our 

 visible coalfields that we have been working, and we have 

 got to know their extent and character fairly well. But 

 so much coal has now been raised, so much wasted in 

 extraction, and so many areas rendered dang'erous or im- 

 possible to work, that we cannot shut our eyes to the grave 

 fact that these visible fields are rapidly approaching ex- 

 haustion. The Government have done well to take stock 

 again of our coal supply and to make a really serious 

 attempt by means of a Royal Commission to gauge its 

 extent and duration ; and we all look forward to that Com- 

 mission to direct attention to this serious waste and to the 

 possibility of better economy which will result from the 

 fuller application of scientific method to exploration, work- 

 ing and employment. 



But we still have an area of concealed coalfields left, 

 possibly at least as large and productive as those already 

 explored and as full of hope for increased industrial develop- 

 ment. It is to these we must now turn attention with a 

 view of obtaining from them the maximum amount possible 

 of the energy that they contain. The same problems which 

 beset the earlier explorers of the visible coalfields will again 

 be present with us in our new task, and there will be in 

 addition a host of new ones, even more difficult and costly, 

 to solve. In spite of this the task will have to be under- 



NO. 1768, VOL. eZ'\ 



taken, and we must not rest until we have as good a know- 

 ledge of the concealed coalfields as we have of those at the 

 surface. This knowledge will have to be obtained in the 

 old way by geological surveying and mapping and by the 

 coordination of all the observations available in the pro- 

 ductive rocks themselves and in those associated with them, 

 whether made in the course of geological study or in mining 

 and exploration. But now the work will have to be done 

 at a depth of thousands instead of hundreds of feet, and 

 under a thick cover of newer strata resting unconformably 

 on those we wish to pierce and work. When we get under 

 the unconformable cover we meet the same geology and 

 th'i same laws of stratigraphy and structure as in more 

 superficial deposits, but accurate induction is rendered in- 

 creasingly ditticult by the paucity of exposures and the small 

 number of facts available owing to the great expense of 

 deep boring. How precious, then, becomes every scrap of 

 information obtained from sinkings and borings, not only 

 where success is met with, but where it is not ; and how 

 little short of criminal is it that there should be the prob- 

 ability that much of this information is being and will be 

 irretrievably lost ! 



Mr. Harmer pointed out in a paper to this Section in 

 1895 that under present conditions there was an automatic 

 check on all explorations of this kind. The only person 

 who can carry it out is the landowner. If he fails he loses 

 his money and does not even secure the sympathy of his 

 neighbours. If he succeeds his neighbours stand to gain 

 as much as he does without sharing in the expense. The 

 successful explorer naturally conceals the information he 

 has acquired because he has had to pay so heavily for it 

 that he cannot afford to put his neighbours in as good a 

 position as himself and make them his rivals as well ; 

 while the unsuccessful man is only too glad to forget as 

 soon as possible all about his unfortunate venture. And 

 yet in work of this kind failure is second only to success 

 in the value of the information it gives as to the under- 

 giound structure which it is so necessary to have if deep 

 mining is to become a real addition to the resources of the 

 country. 



Systematic and detailed exploration, guided by scientific 

 principles, and advancing from the known to the unknown, 

 ought to be our next move forward : a method of explor- 

 ation which shall benefit the nation as well as the in- 

 dividual, a careful record of everything done, a body of 

 men who shall interpret and map the facts as they are 

 acquired and draw conclusions with regard to structure 

 and position from them^ — in short a Geological Survey which 

 shall do as much for Hypogean Geology as existing surveys 

 have done for Epigean Geology, is now our crying need. 

 Unless something of this sort is done, and done in a system- 

 atic and masterful manner, we run a great risk of frittering 

 away the most important of our national resources left to 

 u;, of destroying confidence, of wasting time and money at 

 a most precious and critical period of our history, and of 

 slipping downhill at a time when our equipment and re- 

 sources are ready to enable us to stride forward. 



We do not want to be in the position of a certain town 

 council which kept a list of its old workmen and entered 

 opposite one, formerly sewerage inspector, that he possessed 

 " an extensive memory which is at the disposal of the 

 corporation." 



Even supposing the scheme outlined by Mr. Harmer 

 cannot be carried out in its complete form, a great deal 

 will be done if mining engineers can receive a sufficient 

 geological training to enable them to realise the significance 

 of these underground problems, so that they can recognise 

 when any exploration they are carrying out inside their 

 own area is likely to be of far-reaching geological and 

 economic significance outside the immediate district in 

 which they are personally and immediately concerned. 



Turning to our colonies it is true that in many of them 

 much is being done by competent surveys to attain a know- 

 ledge of mineral resources, but this work should be pushed 

 forward more rapidly, with greater strength and larger- 

 staffs, and above all it should not be limited to areas that 

 happen to be of known economic value just at (he present 

 moment. It is almost a truism that the scientific principle 

 of to-day is the economic instrument of to-morrow, and it 

 will be a good investment to enlarge the bqund^s of gpo- 

 logical theory, trusting to the inevitable resnlt thaf e;yejry 



