October 18, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



515 



of the best agricultural lands is still of the 

 kind that exhausts fertility and mgkes crop 

 failures inevitable. 

 ' In the use of the iron ore deposits there is 

 not even the possibility of duplication in pre- 

 venting the exhaustion of supply. The rate of 

 utilization has for several years been going on 

 at from 25,000,000 to 30,000,000 tons a year. 

 The country has been taking out, say 400,000 

 tons of copper a year and the coal mines of the 

 country yield 475,000,000 tons. The annual 

 lumber and timber products, including fire and 

 pulp wood, are probably valvied at no less than 

 $1,000,000,000. Excepting agriculture and 

 lumbering-, there is no possible way of re- 

 plenishing supplies once exhausted, except by 

 the discovery of new sources of production. 



The forests, the coal beds, the iron ore and 

 the copper, along with the fertility of the soil, 

 are essential parts of the capital of the nation. 

 The annual output from them is not simply 

 income; it is to a large extent a spending of 

 capital. Expenditure of capital resources 

 always points to a time when the community 

 will be put to the necessity of finding substi- 

 tutes for any one or more of these funda- 

 mental elements of national strength. With- 

 out attempting to forecast the time of such 

 exhaustion the policy of the present requires 

 that efforts be made in two directions to put 

 off as far as possible the day of reckoning. 

 Eor the nation that has lost its elements of 

 might in material resources cannot hope to 

 maintain its ascendency among its more 

 powerful and farseeing competitors. 



The two things which a nation can do are 

 to economize consumption and to discover sub- 

 stitutes. The natural effect of rapid consump- 

 tion is productive of higher prices, which in 

 themselves supply an automatic check. But 

 before the check of advancing prices sets in 

 there are always wasteful methods at work 

 which are themselves to no small extent the 

 cause of advancing prices. Only after billions 

 of dollars have been lost in the treatment of 

 the soil, of the forests and the mines, does the 

 policy of more economical management force 

 itself upon those in control. The natural law 

 of supply and demand compels man in his 



treatment of nature to become a better hus- 

 bandman. Yet this is too much like locking 

 the stable after the theft of the horse fully 

 to meet the case. 



The real remedy for rapid and wasteful ex- 

 haustion of natural resources is to be found in 

 technical and scientific research. The endow- 

 ment of such research is one of the greatest 

 financial problems of American industry. The 

 state and federal governments have already 

 provided for agriculture and applied foresight 

 to the use of the public forests. The consoli- 

 dation of iron ore properties under the control 

 of a smaller number of large corporations is in 

 itself a promise of a more economical method 

 of handling them. But the real gain must 

 come from the laboratory, whether in the iron 

 and steel plant or in the experimental rooms 

 of our universities and technical schools. The 

 single item of applying electricity economi- 

 cally to the smelting of ores would in itself, 

 for instance, be worth thousands of times the 

 cost of experimentation and research in a 

 single year's output. — Wall Street Journal. 



ABSTRACTS FOB EVOLUTIONISTS 

 Madreporarian Corals. — In a magnificent 

 work on the Madreporaria of the Hawaiian 

 Islands and Laysan,' Dr. T. W. Vaughan 

 takes up the difiicult questions relating to the 

 species and varieties of these animals, and 

 while leaving them unsettled, gives a most 

 interesting and suggestive discussion, with an 

 abundance of facts, and very good illustra- 

 tions, the latter occupying no less than ninety- 

 six large plates. The following quotations 

 will be of general interest: 



Variation in corals is, we kaow, great and com- 

 plex. If we knew its limits, we should know the 

 limits of the different species. Bernard, in cata- 

 loguing the Perforate Corals of the British Mu- 

 seum {Natural History), experienced so much 

 difficulty in defining them from the collections at 

 his disposal that he decided to abandon the Lin- 

 nsean system of nomenclature, and to use in his 

 catalogues a geographical number system (p. 4). 



Studies of variations, such as those contained 

 in this paper, may appear elaborate to persons 

 who have not gone deeply into the subject, but in 

 reality they are of only a preliminary nature, for 



■ Bulletin 59, U. S. National Museum, 1907. 



