18 . AKNIVEESAET ADDRESS. 



rate of increase in consinnption, there is sufficient coal iu Great 

 Britain, Avitliin a limit of depth suitable for working, to last 276 

 years — allowing that at the end of the first century the consump- 

 tion might be 415 millions of tons per annum ; and, allowing the 

 consumption in that time to reach 274 millions of tons, with a 

 diminishing rate of increaBe, the coal would last 360 years. As 

 one of the means of great expenditure of coal is in the working 

 of iron, attempts have been successfully made in some districts to 

 reduce the consumption of coal. An instance is given by Mr. 

 Hull, where 1 ton 33 cwt. 1 qr. in the North Lancashire line has 

 been found sufficient for a ton of pig iron, whereas seventy-seven 

 years since the consumption of coal on the Clyde was 9^ tons. 

 Again, it is said, a saving of 25 per cent, has been introduced in 

 ocean steamers ; but, according to Mr. Hunt, as quoted by Mr. 

 Hull, a third of the whole quantity raised is consumed in house- 

 holds, amounting to 37,000,000 tons, or about a ton per head of 

 the whole population ; but the Coal Committee say that in 1869 

 it was 14 cwt. per head. It becomes, therefore, no longer a mere 

 theoretical but a practical inquiry, whether the system of heating 

 apartments must not be revised. This, and improvements in 

 scientific iuventious of various kinds, will probably postpone the 

 time assumed for the evil hour. Mr. Hull, whose work on the 

 Coal Fields of Great Britain has now gone into a third edition, 

 has embodied the facts just referred to, in an Essay on what 

 he calls " The Coal Famine," Quarterly Journal of Science, April, 

 1873, and points out how the high price of coal at home, so 

 vexatious to the poor, and so injurious to all classes, does not 

 arise so much from the croakers as from the aboaiinable system 

 of strikes, which inevitably ruin the prospects of the miners them- 

 selves — a system fostered by the worst enemies of the pitmen, 

 and nourished by immorality and semi-barbarism of life adopted 

 by or forced on that population ; so that after all, as in most other 

 cases, immorality and irreligion in a portion of a community have , 

 even in unlooked-for ways, a tendency to bring injury to the 

 whole. 



Now, it may be asked how does this affect us at the Antipodes? 

 Perhaps there is an effect even here from what goes on in the 



