“Stopped! And by what?”
“By the want of coal, which may justly be called the most precious of minerals.”
“Yes, the most precious indeed,” replied the engineer; “and it would seem that nature wished to prove that it was so by making the diamond, which is simply pure carbon crystallized.”
“You don’t mean to say, captain,” interrupted Pencroft, “that we burn diamonds in our stoves in the shape of coal?”
“No, my friend,” replied Harding.
“However,” resumed Gideon Spilett, “you do not deny that some day the coal will be entirely consumed?”
“Oh! the veins of coal are still considerable, and the hundred thousand miners who annually extract from them a hundred millions of hundredweights have not nearly exhausted them.”
“With the increasing consumption of coal,” replied Gideon Spilett, “it can be foreseen that the hundred thousand workmen will soon become two hundred thousand, and that the rate of extraction will be doubled.”
“Doubtless; but after the European mines, which will be soon worked more thoroughly with new machines, the American and Australian mines will for a long time yet provide for the consumption in trade.”
“For how long a time?” asked the reporter.