io THE U. S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY 



The great extent of the United States and the widely sep- 

 arated sources of the national resources render the acquisition 

 by private citizens of information on almost any single prod- 

 uct always difficult, often impossible. 



As a direct result of the size of the country, the government 

 and people have long been uninformed as to our primary in- 

 dustries; those, I mean, which yield the raw materials — min- 

 eral, vegetable, and animal. 



To the Agricultural Department we owe the first reforms 

 from this condition of wide-spread ignorance. In the realm 

 of mineral productions the only efforts made to acquire any 

 positive knowledge have been the highly useful, but feebly 

 endowed, works of the late mining commissions, whose in- 

 vestigations were suffered to end for lack of appropria- 

 tions. 



Today no one knows, with the slightest approach to accu- 

 racy, the status of the mineral industry, either technically, as 

 regards the progress and development making in methods, or 

 statistically, as regards the sources, amounts, and valuations 

 of the various productions. 



Statesmen and economists, in whose hands rest the sub- 

 jects of tariff and taxation, have no better sources of informa- 

 tion than the guesses of newspapers and the scarcely less 

 responsible estimates of officials who possess no adequate 

 means of arriving at truth. 



In no other intelligent nation is this so; on the contrary, 

 mineral production is studied with the most elaborate effort. 

 England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Italy con- 

 sider it essential to know, from year to year, not only the 

 source and aggregates of amount and value of mineral yield, 

 but many lesser facts relating to the modes and economies of 

 the industries. 



Upon considering the extent of country over which our 

 minerals occur, their wonderful variety and yet unmeasured 

 amounts, it cannot fail to be apparent that no private indi- 

 vidual or power is competent to do what ought long since 

 to have been done, namely, to sustain a thoroughly prac- 

 tical investigation and exposition of the mineral indus- 

 try. 



By way of example, and to show how hopeless it is to look 

 to any other source than the government for this service, I 

 select iron. 



