A COAL PROBLEM. ^307 



second-class seams, can be sent to market. But making the most liberal estimate 

 possible, and taking the product of all the fields, as it has been actually worked 

 out, at 151,000 tons per foot thickness of seams per square mile, the marketable 

 contents of all the Pennsylvania anthracite fields when mining began did not ex- 

 ceed 3,275,000,000 tons. The Coal Trade Journal two years ago stated the 

 amount of anthracite marketed to the close of 1878 at 307,000,000 tons. The 

 output of the last three years brings the total close on to 400,000,000 tons, or 

 one-eighth of all the coal originally at hand. 



In determining how long the remainder will last, the annual consumption, 

 and the possibility of greater economy of production, must be taken into account. 

 In 1820 there was used 365 tons, or barely one ton a day for the United States. 

 The next year the consumption reached 1,000 tons, in 1822 it amounted to 3,700, 

 and so on. In 1829 100,000 tons was passed, the sales that year reaching 112, - 

 000; in 1842, 1,000,000 was for the first time exceeded, and in 1864, 10,000,000 

 tons. Taking 30,000,000 tons for the annual consumption hereafter — and that 

 amount will doubtless be exceeded — the various fields will hold out as follows, 

 allowing each the present proportionate output: Southern or Schuylkill basin, 204 

 years; Shamokin, 141 years; Mahanoy, 75 years; Wyoming, 70 years; Lacka- 

 wanna, 64 years; Lehigh, 23 years. " In less than forty years," says the Sun 

 writer, "if coal be produced at the rate of 30,000,000 tons per annum, anthra- 

 cite will be an article of luxury, and the price it will bring in the markets will ex- 

 clude the poor people of this country from the use of this best of fuels." 



It is hardly too much to say that the waste which characterizes the methods 

 of mining now pursued is outrageous. In England and other European countries 

 every pound of coal is taken from the seam, as surely as gold miners take out 

 every particle of quartz within reach. The Pennsylvania system of "pillar and 

 breast" mining, long ago discarded abroad, takes out a cube of coal, ^nd leaves 

 the next cube to smjport the rock overhead. In many cases half of the contents 

 of the vein is thus^bandoned. Waste in other ways reduces the yield of the 

 seam still further to not over one-third of its contents. When coal grows scarcer 

 mere selfishness, even if no considerations of the public good, will occasion closer 

 work, and thus put off the day of the consumption of Pennsylvania's last pound 

 of anthracite. But while waste of bituminous coal is bad enough, that of anthra- 

 cite is inexcusable. — Globe- Democrat. 



Thousands of persons assembled at the termini of the St. Gothard tunnel to 

 witness the inauguration of one of the most splendid and universally beneficial 

 engineering achievements of this century. This tunnel is about nine and a quar- 

 ter miles long, being about one and two-thirds miles longer than that of Mt. 

 Cenis. It runs in a straight line from the village of Goschnen, on the Swiss side, 

 to the Italian frontier locality of Afrolo, thus placing Lucerne and Milan in com- 

 munication by rail. 



