45 
Ordinary Meeting, December l£th, 1865. 
R. Angus Smith, Ph.D., F.R.S., &c., President, 
in the Chair. 
Mr. J. Bottomley said that a recent paper upon the 
employment of the internal heat of the earth led him to con- 
sider what might be the condition of the atmosphere when 
coal, lignite, anthracite, and all other forms of vegetable fuel 
should be so exhausted that the human race would be com- 
pelled to resort to this source of heat. The numbers obtained 
led him to the conclusion that the exhaustion of the coal 
fields implied more than the depriving of the human race of 
a ready source of warmth, namely, the alteration of the 
atmosphere to an extent that would ultimately prove fatal. 
As the latter assumption seemed to him to be repugnant to 
reason, he would infer that long before the exhaustion of the 
coal fields, the carbonic acid in the atmosphere beyond the 
limits of safety to life, would have been decomposed by 
vegetation ; moreover, as plants decomposed water, there 
would always be some combustible compound of carbon and 
hydrogen ; in other words, there will and must be abundance 
of fuel in the world in all ages, if not of so dense a character 
as anthracite and coal, yet of some nature intermediate 
between those fuels and vegetable tissue, the origin of all 
varieties. The effect of vegetation in maintaining the purity 
of the atmosphere has long been known. The assumption 
that this agency is sufficient to furnish an abundant and per- 
petual supply of fuel to mankind involves no new principle, but 
it tends to establish a new inference upon principles already 
Proceedings— Lit. & Phil. Society— Yol. Y.— No. 6 —Session 1865 - 66 . 
