CHAPTER X 
PLANTS AS A SOURCE OF NATIONAL POWER—COAL ! 
By MARIE C. STOPES, D.Sc., Ph.D. 
Lecturer in Paleobotany, Fellow University College, London 
Man is not only a restless centre of energy himself, 
he demands increasingly the dispersal and rearrangement 
of the energy of the material world around him. Units 
of energy, leashed, give man his power to build, to 
grow and to destroy ; and of all stores of dormant energy, 
coal is the most useful to him. 
In the words of the Royal Commission on Coal (1905), 
“Weare convinced that Coal is our only reliable source 
of power, and that there is no real substitute ’’ for coal. 
It is true that we were a powerful nation in Elizabeth’s 
reign, and yet it is said that she prohibited the use 
of coal in London when Parliament was sitting, lest 
the health of the Knights of the Shires might suffer 
during their residence in town. But that was before 
the days of the hatching out of James Watt’s brood of 
steam engines, which, like fiery dragons, demand more 
and ever more energy to feed them. Yet we dare not 
slay these dragons, as Samuel Butler told us to do in 
his inimitable Erewhon, for in the world to-day other 
1 Public Lecture delivered at University College, London, March 26, 
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