The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    long maintain their then rate of increase; which he interpreted as meaning that a check to British progress must become per- ceptible considerably within a century from the time of his writing.” The course of events has already confirmed his pre- diction; for the British production of coal since he wrote has lagged behind the theoretical calculations he made of what it would be if the same rate of increase were maintained. Since he wrote there have been two Government Commissions ap- pointed for investigating the subject, with the remarkable re- sult that in spite of the continued large extraction of coal, which has increased at the rate of about three million tons a year, the remaining supply underground in Great Britain has constantly increased in the estimates! For in 1871 the Com- mission reported the supply to be slightly over ninety billion tons, and in 1903 the last Commission reported it at a little more than one hundred billion tons. To-day the British are talking of their supply as amounting to a hundred and ninety billion tons; but this takes into account deposits in smaller seams and below four thousand feet, no longer considered to be the limit of depth at which mining is feasible. When Je- vons wrote, coal mining had not gone down more than twenty- five hundred feet; now it has gone down beyond thirty-five hundred, and some other kinds of mines have exceeded five thousand feet. The 1871 Commission calculated that British coal mining would last two hundred and seventy-six years, though one of their experts thought it would be used up in one hundred and nine years and another extended its duration to three hundred and sixty; and Professor Geikie, commenting on their Report, believed that the increase of British coal pro- duction would go on for seventy or eighty years in a dimin- ishing ratio, and then decline would set in.’ Since then greater 5 Op. cit., 215. 6 See an article on The National Coal-Supply in the Quarterly Review, July, 1905, p. 139. : : 7In an article How long will our Coal last? in the Pall Mall Magazine, 1901, p. 396. Previously, in 1891, T. Forster Brown held that the increase would go on for a quarter of a century, maintain itself at a maximum for another quarter of a century, and then begin to decline, The Coal Question, in The Economic Journal, vol. i. no. 4, p. 666. And still earlier the authors of Coal: its History and Uses, edited by Prof. Thorpe, London, 1878, cal- culated that in sixty years from that date the output of coal in Great Brit- ain would be eight times the then amount, and a certain rise of price of the most serious character would take place within that time, p. 319.