92 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
Even to-day, in spite of improved technical knowledge, there remain 
many areas in which information and inference are both scanty, and where 
difficulties met in working have not yet been surmounted, while there will 
be in the future ample scope for improved methods and inventions to deal 
with coal at greater depths than those at which it can at present be 
economically worked. ‘here is room for much new and more precise 
study than has yet been devoted to the variation of coal-seams, both in 
the vertical direction and when traced over the wide areas of their extent. 
Elaborate and knowledgeable sampling, followed by new means of testing, 
and these again by new methods for recognition of varieties, have still to 
be put into practice before it can be said that we are making a justifiable 
and economic use of the capital reserves stored up in the rocks. 
Oil.—While we blame our forefathers for their destructive and wasteful 
handling of the coal-fields, it is ourselves and our own generation that we 
must blame for serious waste of oil and the destructive exploitation of oil- 
fields that have been permitted. There is no economic subject to which 
geology has so direct a relation as the occurrence and exploration of oil- 
tields, and nothing in recent times has given so much employment and 
such valuable experience to geologists all over the world. It is the only 
example we have of the sudden introduction of a new source of fuel on a 
large scale in a late stage of industrial development, and it has already 
revolutionised many branches of engineering practice. The introduction 
and spread of the internal-combustion engine and all that this implies in 
space-economy, cleanliness, labour-saving, and comfort, has been the 
greatest engineering feature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries, and it has given rise to systems and methods which mankind 
would be loth to abandon. The whole world is being searched to prolong 
the good times that we live in; but in spite of the fact that there probably 
still remains a recoverable percentage in the oil-producing areas, and that 
there must be new fields awaiting discovery, there are already signs that 
the high oil-mark has been reached if not passed. But, again, it is no 
small comfort that although our supply ot native oil, easily won and 
easily refined and applied, cannot last very much longer, there are 
abundant supplies of oil-shale still left, sufficient to take its place for very 
many decades to come. 
Metals, &c.—Although the greater part of to-day’s session is to be taken 
up by papers and discussions on special sides of economic geology, by those 
who are far more competent than I to speak on them, I cannot resist the 
temptation to say a few words on that side of the subject which touches on 
metal-mining. There is probably no subject which has been in the past more 
dominated by the ‘ practical man,’ who may be defined as the most 
theoretical of all men, but whose theories are seldom proved and are often 
not susceptible of proof. The valuable information that was accessible to 
him has been wasted because he could not use it to the best advantage, or else 
it has been lost because he could or would not impart it. On the other 
hand, the ‘theorist,’ as he has been contemptuously named, has been 
hampered because he has often only been called in when difficulties were 
excessive and when the train of facts or reasoning which would have been 
so valuable to him has been lost. 
In Britain the mining industry is so old and the mineral wealth in 
certain spots was so plenteous and accessible that the metal-mining 
geologist has had little chance. The eyes have been picked out of the 
