448 Professor W. W. Watts— 



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 

 ti'aversed, and all that great group of characters designated as tbe 

 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 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 underground ; 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 w^e 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 ai-eas rendered dangerous or impossible 

 to work, that we cannot shut our eyes to the grave fact that these 

 visible fields are rapidly approaching exhaustion. 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 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 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 task will have to be undertaken, and 

 we must not rest until we have as good a knowledge of the con- 

 cealed 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 co-ordination of all the observations available 

 in the productive 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 the same laws of stratigraphy and 



