Coal And Civilization

Text extracted from opening pages of book: COAL djtd BY EDWARD CHARLES JEFFREY PH. D., S. D., LL. D. PROFESSOR OF PLAKT MORPHOLOGY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1925 ALL lights reserved A. Fragment of coal showing transition from bituminous coal to cannel. B. Striped coal showing the alternation of glistening and dull layers. COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1925. Printed in the United States of America by J-JT. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED To R. W. S. LOYAL AND GENEROUS FRIEND PREFACE The present volume is planned for the use of two distinct publics. In the first place, it is considered of real importance to direct the general reader to the fundamental part played by coal and its products, such as petroleum, gasoline, dye-stuffs, explosives, etc., etc., in our modern civilization. The welfare and prosperity of nations, in this industrial age, is in timately connected with the use and exploitation of coal and its derivatives. Not only is national well being intimately connected with coal resources, but the political future of great nations and races is likewise inevitably bound up with the same mineral. The problems of Europe are very obviously prob lems of coal. The so-called decadence of certain of the European races is clearly not due to any real degeneracy, but rather to poverty of resources in coal. This is notably true of the Latin races and is only less obviously the case for those Nordic nations which are without the indispensable mineral of our modern civilization. On the other hand the rise of Great Britain and Germany, in the past two cen turies, is clearly and mainly bound up withthe development of their great coal resources. Further, the problem of coal cannot be appreciated viii PREFACE fully without a knowledge of the structure and mode of origin of this truly invaluable mineral. The writer, during the past two decades, has devoted much time and energy to the study of extinct plants, on account of their basal relation to any permanently valuable hypotheses in biology, which have to do with evolution. In the course of these studies, he had devoted much time to the devising of improved methods of investigation. In the past, our knowl edge of extinct plants has been confined chiefly to the impressions left by these on the strata. More recently the petrified remains, which are all too rare, have yielded much valuable information as to the succession and nature of plants during the geological ages. There are great accumulations of carbonized remains of plants in the form of coals and lignites, which in the past have been virtually a sealed record to the investigator of evolution. The present author has succeeded in making these documents available for study by the development of new methods of investigation. It was only natural that in the course of investi gations on the carbonized remains of plants, the huge deposits of these, which appear as coal, should have received attention. Fifteen years ago, we knew virtually nothing about the structure of coal, with the exception of a few individual types which could be investigated by the methods used by the mineralogist and petrologist. Now all that is changed and we know the organization of all com PREFACE ix bustible minerals from peat to anthracite, and are in a position, as a consequence, to put forward validhypotheses as to the origin and modifications of the various types and ranks of coal. Although the author cannot claim to be a geolo gist, he feels obliged to pay a tribute to the courtesy and helpfulness of his geological colleagues, who have not only supplied him with abundant mate rials for his investigations, but have also welcomed his results with often too generous praise. It has even been suggested by some of his German col leagues that an institute be established in that coun try to carry on work on coal with the Jeffreyschen Methoden. This tribute must be regar