nye? 
a a sagen’ 
as . 
OctToBER 5, 1916] 
progress has been made in the last twenty years. Of 
late a few deep borings have been sunk; one near High 
Wycombe, after piercing the Mesozoic cover, ended in 
Ludlow rocks; another at Batsford, in Gloucestershire, . 
fifteen miles north of the well-known Burford boring, 
struck what are regarded as Upper Coal Measures, 
also resting on Silurian rocks. 
At the present time it seems specially fitting to direct 
attention once again to our haphazard method of 
grappling with this great economic question. Are we 
to go on indefinitely pursuing what is almost “ wild- 
cat" boring, to use the petroleum miner’s expressive 
slang? Or shall we boldly face the fact that systematic 
exploration is demanded; and that this pioneer work 
is a national obligation, the expense of which should 
be a national charge? 
At a meeting of the Organising Committee of Sec- 
tion C a recommendation was forwarded to thé council 
in the following terms :— 
“The council of the British Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science recommends that the site, depth, 
and diameter of every borehole in the British Isles 
exceeding 500 ft. in depth be compulsorily notified 
and registered in a Government office. That all such 
boreholes be open to Government inspection during 
their progress. That copies of the journals and other 
information relating to the strata penetrated by the 
boring be filed in a Government office under the same 
restrictions as those relating to plans of abandoned 
mines.” ; 
I would go further and urge that the Government 
should undertake the sinking of deep borings at 
selected points. This is no new idea. In his presi- 
dential address to the Geological Society of London 
in 1912 Prof. Watts pleaded most forcibly the vital 
importance of a State-aided underground survey of the 
area to which I have referred. The work is too vast 
for individual effort, or even for a private company 
to undertake. It is not suggested that deep borings 
should be sunk with the express purpose of finding 
coal. What is wanted is a systematic survey by bor- 
ings at such spots as are likely to throw light upon 
the structural framework of the Palzozoic floor and 
the thickness of its cover. 
Of course, there are difficulties in the way of such 
a scheme. There is the expense. But in view of the 
enormous economic possibilities of the work, and re- 
membering that it is now possible to sink a boring to 
a depth of, say, 1200 ft., and to bring up 18-in. cores at 
a cost less than 2oool., it cannot be reasonably argued 
that the expense is beyond the nation’s power to bear. 
A levy of a farthing a ton on the coal output of the 
United Kingdom for a single year would yield some- 
thing like 300,000l., a capital sum that would provide 
in perpetuity an additional yearly grant to the Geo- 
logical Survey of 15,000l., which would suffice not 
only to carry on this work, but would enable the 
Survey to extend its functions in the other directions 
I have indicated. 
As to legal obstacles and vested mineral rights, I 
wish to say nothing excent that if the country could 
be convinced that this work is urgently needed on 
national grounds, all scruples and doubts, so agitating 
to the official mind, would speedily vanish. 
For many years’ I lived near our gréat exporting 
centres of the finest steam coal in the world, and as I 
watched the steady and incessant streams of. coal- 
Waggons, year in, year out,.coming down from the 
hills, I was constantly reminded that we are rapidly 
draining the country of its industrial life-blood. Is it 
an extravagant demand to ask that an infinitesimal 
fraction of this irreplaceable Nature-made wealth should 
be set aside to provide the means for the discovery 
and development in our islands of new mineral fields? 
NO. 2449, VOL. 98] 
’ 
NATURE 
Io! 
Chemical and Microscopical Investigation of Coal 
Seams. ; : 
The recovery of by-products in the coking of coal, 
which up to the beginning of the war was almost 
exclusively undertaken by the Germans, is likely in the 
future to become an important British industry. This 
will ultimately demand a thorough knowledge of the 
microscopic and chemical structure of all the important 
coking seams in our coalfields. : 
Remembering how varied both in microscopical 
structure and chemical composition the individual 
laminz of many of the thick coal-seams are, it will 
readily appear how important such a detailed investiga- 
tion may become, having regard to the great variety of 
these by-products and their industrial - application. 
Moreover, thin seams, hitherto discarded, may pay to 
be worked, as may also an enormous amount of small 
coal, estimated at from 10 to 20 per cent. of the total 
output, which up to the present has been wasted. 
Geology of Petroleum. 
It has been frequently remarked that in order to 
account for the vast accumulation of coal in the Car- 
boniferous strata, it is necéssary to postulate a special 
coincidence over great areas of the northern hemi- 
sphere of favourable conditions of plant growth, 
climate, sedimentation, and crustal subsidence, condi- 
tions which, although they obtained at other geological 
periods over relatively small areas, were never re- 
peated on so vast a scale. Having regard to the esti- 
mates of coal deposits in Cretaceous and Tertiary 
strata, published in our first international Coal Census, 
the ‘“‘Report on the.Coal Resources of the World,’ 
it would appear that we might reasonably link the 
Cretaceo-Tertiary period with the Carboniferous in 
respect of these peculiar and widely prevalent coal- 
making conditions. For I find that of the actual and 
probable reserves of coal in the world, according to 
our present state of knowledge, about 43 million million 
tons of bituminous and anthracite coal exist, the vast 
bulk of which is of Carboniferous age; while there are 
about 3 million million tons of lignites and sub- 
bituminous coals, mostly of Cretaceous and Tertiary. 
age. 
“When we look to the geological distribution of 
petroleum, we note that it is to be found in rocks of 
practically every age in more or less quantity, but that 
it occurs par excellence, and on a great commercial 
scale, in rocks of two geological periods (to a smaller 
extent in a third); and it is significant that these 
two periods are the great coal-making periods in 
geological history—the Carboniferous and the Cretaceo- 
Tertiary. It would take me beyond my present pur- 
pose to explore the avenues of thought and speculation 
opened up by this parallel. I will only remark that it 
seems to afford some support for the view that coal 
and petroleum are genetically as well as chemically 
related. While the terrestrial vegetation of the two 
periods was accumulating under specially favourable 
physiographical conditions, ultimately to be mineralised 
into seams of coal, the stores of petroleum believed 
to be indigenous to strata of the same periods were 
probably derived from the natural distillation of the 
plankton which must have flourished, too, on _an enor- 
mous scale in the shallow, muddy waters adjacent to 
this luxuriant land growth. The phytoplankton, in- 
cluding such families as the Diatomacee and Peri- 
diniza, may well have played the ‘chief réle in this 
petroleum formation, while affording unlimited sus- 
tenance to the small and lowly animal organisms, like 
Entomostraca, the fatty distillates of which doubtless 
contributed to the stores of oil. It is possible, then, 
1 Report on “ The Coal Resources of the World” ‘for the Twelfth Intern 
Geol. Congress, 1913. 
