competent scientists the finest farming country to which man has
ever set the plow. Our mineral wealth was likewise lying
everywhere ready to the uses of the new generation. The United
States now supplies the world with half its copper, but in 1865
it was importing a considerable part of its own supply. It was
not till 1859 that the first "oil gusher" of western Pennsylvania
opened up an entirely new source of wealth. Though we had the
largest coal deposits known to geologists, we were bringing large
supplies of this indispensable necessity from Nova Scotia. It has
been said that coal and iron are the two mineral products that
have chiefly affected modern civilization. Certainly the nations
that have made the greatest progress industrially and
commercially--England, Germany, America--are the three that
possess these minerals in largest amount. From sixty to seventy
per cent of all the known coal deposits in the world were located
in our national domain. Nature had given no other nation anything
even remotely comparable to the four hundred and eighty square
miles of anthracite in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Enormous fields of bituminous lay in those Appalachian ranges
extending from Pennsylvania to Alabama, in Michigan, in the Rocky
Mountains, and in the Pacific regions. In speaking of our iron it
is necessary to use terms that are even more extravagant. From
colonial times Americans had worked the iron ore plentifully
scattered along the Atlantic coast, but the greatest field of
all, that in Minnesota, had not been scratched. From the
settlement of the country up to 1869 it had mined only 50,000,000
tons of iron ore, while up to 1910 we had produced 685,000,000
tons. The streams and waterfalls that, in the next sixty years,
were to furnish the power that would light our cities, propel our
street-cars, drive our transcontinental trains across the