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wealth, and in a degree so much higher than any other region 
in Europe, that it need excite no surprise if those natural gifts 
which even aroused the industry of the early Britons, and 
excited the cupidity of their Roman conquerors, yield at the 
present day an amount of riches far greater than those pro- 
duced by any other nation. Let us, then, consider the great 
population supported directly by the extraction of these minerals, 
and indirectly by their application to the arts, — the main- 
tenance of hundreds of thousands of men by these not in- 
exhaustible stores, — and the entire dependence of our whole 
manufacturing and commercial system on the supply of fossil 
fuel ; and we cannot fail to arrive at the conviction, that in 
exercising the stewardship of such gifts of Heaven, the nation 
has a high and responsible duty to perform, that waste and 
improvidence are a national sin, and that it behoves all who are 
in any way connected with the working of our mines to lend 
their best endeavours to the perfecting of the most economical 
and efficacious means of rendering all the products of our mines 
available to the uses of mankind. 
It is not pretended that by any plan of education in an 
Institution of this kind, it is possible to make a miner, or in 
other words, to prepare a man for taking charge of a mine as 
soon as he has left our walls : not more reasonably should we 
expect that a lad drilled in the classes of a naval college were 
at once metamorphosed into a sailor, fitted at once to take 
command of a ship. Yet surely no one will deny, that if in 
that school he has learnt to box the compass, to knot and splice, 
if he has worked out problems in navigation on sound 
mathematical principles, if he has been taught by descriptions 
how to handle a vessel at anchor in a tideway, or on a lee-shore, 
he will be infinitely more ready to take advantage of circum- 
stances, and to make rapid progress, than if he had been sent 
on board unknowing of these things and their principles. No 
“ royal road ” to learning, no legerdemain of “ cramming,” can 
make amends for the want of time and pains bestowed on the 
acquisition of practice ; and as with the seaman so should it be 
with the miner. 
By description, by drawings, and models, it will be our 
