652 REPORT— 1908« 



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 feelino; tbe competition of their awakening 

 strength. Can we carry on the struggle and maintain the lead we have gained ? 



In answering this question there are three great considerations to keep in 

 mind. First, our own mineral wealth is not exhausted; secondly, that of our 

 colonies is as yet almost untouched ; and thirdly, there are still many uncolonised 

 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 anpliances, of the working only of the best-paying seams and 

 areas, of the water difficulty, and the want of well-kept plans and records of areas 

 worked and unworked ; waste iu employment because of the low efficiency of the 

 machinery which turns this energy into work. With all this waste our coaltields 

 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 reduce 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 accomplished 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 trom all sorts of rocks and regions had been available for application to 

 the coal districts iu 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- 

 ground ; nor do we, as in the past, throw away vast suras of money iu sinlfing 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 wo have got to know tlieir extent and character 

 fairly well. But so much coal has now been raised, so much wasted iu extraction, 

 and so many areas rendered dangerous or impossible to work, that we cannot shut 

 our eyes to the grave fact that these visible fields are rapidly approaching exhaus- 

 tion. 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 Commission 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, working, 

 and employmeut. 



But Ave 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 indus- 

 trial_ development. 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 coal- 

 fields 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 

 lask will have to be undertaken, and we must not rest until we have as good a 

 knowledge 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 



