"I suppose that nineteen hundred years ago, when Julius Cæsar was good enough to deal with Britain as we have dealt with New Zealand, the primæval Briton, blue with cold and woad, may have known that the strange black stone which he found here and there in his wanderings would burn, and so help to warm his body and cook his food. Saxon, Dane, and Norman swarmed into the land. The English people grew into a powerful nation; and Nature still waited for a return for the capital she had invested in ancient club mosses. The eighteenth century arrived, and with it James Watt. The brain of that man was the spore out of which was developed the steam engine, and all the prodigious trees and branches of modern industry which have grown out of this. But coal is as much an essential of this growth and development as carbonic acid is of a club moss. Wanting the coal, we could not have smelted the iron needed to make our engines; nor have worked our engines when we got them. But take away the engines, and the great towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire vanish like a dream. Manufactures give place to agriculture and pasture, and not ten men could live where now ten thousand are amply supported.
"Thus all this abundant wealth of money and of vivid life is Nature's investment in club mosses and the like so long ago. But what becomes of the coal which is burnt in yielding the interest? Heat comes out of it, light comes out of it, and if we could gather together all that goes up the chimney, and all that remains in the grate of a thoroughly burnt coal fire, we should find ourselves in possession of a quantity of carbonic acid, water, ammonia, and mineral matters exactly equal in weight to the coal. But these are the very matters with which Nature supplied the club mosses which made coal. She is paid back principal and interest at the same time; and she straightway invests the carbonic acid, the water, and the ammonia in new forms of life, feeding with them the plants that now live. Thrifty Nature, surely! no prodigal, but the most notable of housekeepers."[121]
[121] Contemporary Review, 1871.
All this is true and well told; but who is "Nature," this goddess who, since the far-distant Carboniferous age, has been planning for man? Is this not another name for that Almighty Maker who foresaw and arranged all things for His people "before the foundation of the world."
References:—On Structures in Coal, Journal Geological Society of London, xv., 1853. Contains results of microscopic study of Nova Scotia coals. Conditions of Accumulation of Coal, Ibid., xxii., 1866. Contains South Joggins section. Spore-cases in Coal, Am. Journal of Science, 3rd series, vol. I, 1871. Rhizocarps in the Devonian, Bulletin Chicago Academy, vol. I, 1886. "Acadian Geology and Supplement," 3rd edition, 1891, Cumberland Coal Field. "Geological History of Plants," chap, iv., London and New York, 2nd edition, 1892.
[THE OLDEST AIR-BREATHERS.]
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FRIEND AND EARLY PATRON AND GUIDE
SIR CHARLES LYELL,
To whom we are Indebted for so much
of the Scientific Basis of Modern Geology.