Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
79 
bilities and weaknesses; thereby engendering cowardly fear and ap¬ 
prehension among consumers of coal, that their cart loads will be¬ 
come pails full, and their shrinking weight will increase in price, 
as they are doled out by middle men, whose harvest comes when 
snow, ice and dread winter chains their victims. A glance at those 
who are thus dependent will indicate the loss to a state whose poor 
are cold and hungry. Prof. Emmons, in his report on the Geologi¬ 
cal Survey of New York says, “anything that will save further des¬ 
truction of forests, and we have it in the homely substance peat, an 
available article, which prejudice alone can prevent general use.” 
Naturally the question arises, how a substance found in such 
quantities, and generally existing in those districts where fuel is 
expensive, should so long have been overlooked. The reply must be 
found among those anomolous facts that men often fail to do that 
which their interests demand from fear of failure, or until com¬ 
pelled by the tyrant necessity. This inconsistency is most marked 
by the indifference of the people and their representatives on the 
subject of fuel supply. Enterprising and indolent alike, have drift¬ 
ed into the use of coal without a thought of the unnumbered mil¬ 
lions of tons of valuable peat fuel scattered throughout the state, 
seemingly to provide for our absolute needs, while speeches, lectures, 
sermons and essays, eminating from the best and most learned 
men, if not the most practical thinkers in the state, are produced 
and reproduced upon other subjects, until finance, transportation and 
tarriff are common place in every household in the state, while 
the supply of fuel, a vital element that touches our actual physical 
existence as food does, involving the future progress of the state, 
is ignored, abandoned or surrendered to rings and railroads, with¬ 
out even an effort on the part of our legislature to know through 
any systematic examination of the subject, whether the industrial 
efforts made to substitute peat fuel were based on sound principles, 
or were a mere repetition of previous experiments in preparing it. 
And this inconsistency is confirmed by the fact that peat has 
been used-since the'twelfth century, prepared by hand labor, and is 
used to day in Wisconsin, if used at all, in the same crude form as 
for centuries past. 
While the calorific power of peat as compared to coal or wood is 
as well known and defined by actual use, scientific experiment and 
careful analysis, as either wood or coal, showing that when it is 
