410 Notices of Books . [July, 
thousand various ways.” But in every one of these ways we 
are hindered, injured, or annoyed by one of its ingredients. All 
true coal contains sulphur, sometimes as little as a pound in the 
tor and sometimes exceeding a pound in the hundredweight. 
If we burn it in our domestic fires or in the furnaces of our 
steam-engines we fill the air with fumes of sulphurous acid, 
which is taken up by atmospheric moisture, and descends upon 
the ground in the form of a corrosive rain, blighting and 
destroying vegetation. If we use it in metallurgical operations 
this same sulphur injures the quality of the metal obtained. 
We employ the coal in our gas-works, and are still haunted by 
the same enemy. The gas must be purified at considerable 
expense, and even when all has been done that science and 
experience can suggest, it still retains traces of sulphur. 
Hence if burned in our dwellings, shops, or warehouses, it 
injures the colours of textile goods, weakens their fibre, and 
damages books, pictures, steel-wares, and a long catalogue of 
other substances. It may be said that we may some day 
remove the sulphur from the coal. But we must remember that 
it is too small in quantity to render such an attempt remunera- 
tive, or even self-supporting; that it is present in a form not 
soluble in any cheap liquid, and that it is disseminated in 
minute particles through the entire mass of the coal. If we 
apply heat we drive it off, and decompose the coal at the same 
time. In short, to remove it without injury to the fuel, and 
without seriously enhancing its price, is a problem whose 
solution is not even conceivable. So long as we regard coal as 
a something existing without any special reference to man, and 
of which he avails himself, taking, in the common phrase, “ the 
rough with the smooth,” all this may cause regret, but not 
surprise. If, on the other hand, we are told to view it as a 
something especially prepared for man’s use, by a Being of 
infinite power and wisdom, we are at once staggered. Were 
coal the product of a finite, imperfect, human intelligence, we 
should pronounce it useful, certainly, but very faulty. And 
finding it thus faulty, can we, without irreverence, proclaim it 
in the sense the author takes, the work of Infinite Wisdom ? 
This instance of coal is no isolated case ; our sulphur ores are 
contaminated with arsenic, our iron ores with sulphur and 
phosphorus, all generally in quantities too small to be of value, 
or to cover the process of separation, but quite sufficient to 
deteriorate the bodies which they thus accompany. Such fadts 
will always incline many minds to turn away with sadness from 
the study of final causes, feeling that they can afford no 
satisfactory evidence of the rule of a Being at once all-powerful, 
all-wise, and all-beneficent. 
