IS THE PROPERTY OF THE WORLD EXHAUSTLESS?

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 6, Issue 324, 16 November 1865, Page 2

IS THE PROPERTY OF THE WORLD EXHAUSTLESS?

[From the Spectator.] Is it a certainty that the supply of light, air, water, heat, and the constituents, whatever they are, of fruitfulness, will always remain the same? As to light, that may be assumed —though granting indefinite time, astronomers have something to say on that point—and in air, we know of no change fatal to man. Water is much more doubtful. The supply has failed in some regions, notably Numidia and the Babylonian plain, and as the first cause of failure, the denudation of the mountains, is going on at an accelerated rate, the deficiency may extend to regions we do not dream of. It certainly is extending in Lombardy, in the Pyrenean departments of Franco and in parts of India—notably Agra and Ghazeepore—and Dr Symons says it has commenced in England, the rainfall having declined some inches in the last few years. Why is it certain that the process must stop short of a point at which food could not be grown when it has not stopped short in Numidia? Water is essential to fruitfulness, and even apart from it, is it quite certain that there is no such thing as an exhaustion of the soil beyond the reach of science ? What will be the reduction of English produce when the supply of guano, and coprolites, and lime comes to an end, and guano, and coprolites, and lime are all fixed quantities: man can produce no more when the supply is done. Science may discover a substitute, probably will discover one, but the assumption that it must is assumption merely. So with heat. Man knows as yet of only three readily available means of producing heat —the burning of dried dung, of wood, and of coal. The first, though universally employed in India, is insufficient, and detracts too much from the sources of fertility, and the second is disappearing with such rapidity that foresters can predict to a century the extinction of the existing supply. The pace at which the forests are being cleared away is one of the most dangerous incidents of modem progress, and except in South America or Central Africa there is nowhere great natural renewal. Artificial renewal is of course possible,*—the biggest experiment ever made in that direction being in the Punjab, and believed to promise success, but the highest efforts of man are baby-play by thesidc of the glorious prodigality

of nature. What can man do to compare with what nature has doue in the valley of the Amazon which three centuries hence will be as bare as the valley of the Indus, in which, though it was once a forest, the trees can be counted for hundreds of miles upon the fingers. Denudation of c urse may cease, but that it will cease, is au assumption not warranted by analogies. There remains coal and if there is one fact certain in science, it is that the supply of coal is a fixed quantity which must end some time. It may last thousands of years, but it cannot last for ever, and when it is done man must either discover some new source of heat, of which he has yet only dreams, or surrender a civilization based in every part upon his possession of a means of producing intense heat at will. He may be able to smelt iron bv electricity, or by concentrating the sun’s rays, but be is not able now, and to assume that he will bo able is a mere guess. It would be just as reasonable to guess the exact contrary. Dreams, says our readers, dreams as bad as Dr Cumming’s. N o t a doubt of it, for we have intentionally omitted the primary element, that Providence* whose designs, cannot be interrupted either by the failure of the dirt of sea-gull or the reckless-use of the axe, but then nobody has proved or can prove that the temporary following of the whole earth may not be within those designs. Some countries have been abandoned and renewed: witness the wonderful structures lying desolate amid the jungles of Cambodia, and the artistic temples lying in heaps oi ruin and amid the forests of Yucatan, and why not all? That is mere speculation, but it is not speculation to say that there will be immense transfers of civilization, that England for example will in all in human probability, lose much of her pre eminence in manufactures, that unless science can make a great leap forward, the exhaustion of heat-giving material will occur here. Wood, as a fuel competent to sustain manufactures, has disappeared from among us, and coal is rapidiy going too. Mr Jevous, Lecturer to the Owens College in Manchester, who has devoted years toto the inquiry, reports his conclusions supported by figures which, wild as they will appear to those who have never reflected on the subject, seem to us almost unanswerable. To prove them we must republish his book, but the steps which he considers proved can be easily summarised. He holds up as a demonstrable fact that coal cannot be raised by any known appliances from a depth of more than 4,000 feet below the level of the sea, or 1,-500 below the deepest existing mine; and that the quantity of coal now existing above that depth is eighty-three thousand milions of tons a year, and and if it did not increase, the supply would last with an increasing cost nearly a thousand years. Supposing that rate to continue, and the tendency is to one very much quicker, the consumption would in 1961 be at the rate of 1,607 millions of tons a year, and by that time the whole existing deposit of coal will have been consumed. The rise in consumption is, however, impossible, as with exhaustion would come the ail-powerful check of rising price, “but this only means that the check to our progress must become perceptible considerably within a century from the present time, that the cost of fuel must rise, perhaps within a lifetime, to a rate threatening our commercial and manufacturingsupremacy, and the conclusion is inevitable that our present happy progressive condition is a thing of limited duration.” In short, the indefinite duration of English progressive development which is based upon a boundless supply of coal dose to the iron fields and seats of manufacture, must in about a century stop. “ Suppose our progress to be checked within half century, yet by that time our consumption will probably be four times what it now is ; there is nothing impossible or improbable in this; it is a very moderate supposition, considering that our consumption has increased eightfold in the last sixty years. But how shortened and darkened will the prospects of the country appear with mines already deep, fuel dear, and yet a high rate of consumption to keep up if wa are not to retrograde.” There need not be positive retrogression for years after that, but the power of limitless progress will pass away from Great Britain and be transferred to to the localities where coal is still on the spot in its old abundance, that is, to the North American fields. That, supposing coal to continue the one artificial heat-giver, is as certain as any result in multiplication. Science may, for instance, have discovered a light infinitely superior to lighted coal smoke—we seem on the brink of that—a motor cheaper and more powerful than steam, and smelting contrivance simpler and hotter than coal fire, but that is as yet an assumption, and even if a correct one, the new discovery must be one the use of which will not be limited by locality, and the special advantage of England among the nation* of the world must pass away.