considerable export trade was established with London, and it speedily
became an article among the various manufacturers of the metropolis. But
its popularity was but short lived. An impression became general
that the smoke arising therefrom contaminated the atmosphere and was
injurious to public health. Years of experience have proved the fallacy
of the imputation; but in 1306 the outcry became so general that a
proclamation was issued by Edward I forbidding the use of the offending
fuel, and authorizing the destruction of all furnaces, etc., of those
persons who should persist in using it. Prejudice gradually gave way as
the value of the fossil fuel became better known, and from that time
downward its use has become more and more extended down to the enormous
extent of our present trade. The annual increase in the production of
coal in the British Isles since the year 1854 is over 21/2 million tons.
In that year the coal produce was about 65 million tons, and it has
grown up to the year 1880 to the grand total of 135 million tons.

We will now deal with some of the uses that this valuable black diamond
is now being put to. It is, in the first place, the center of all our
enterprise and prosperity, and upon it depends our chief success as a
manufacturing nation for the future. When it is exhausted we shall have
to look forward to the condition of things which now obtains in those
regions where there is no coal--that is to say, instead of our being a
nation full of manufacturing and mercantile enterprise, a great nation
to which all the people of the earth resort, we shall be merely a people
who live for ourselves by the cultivation of the ground. The duration of
our coal fields has been ascertained within certain limits. Mr. Hall, an
accomplished geologist, tells us that in England at the present time we
have a stock of coal sufficient for our consumption for no less than
1,000 years. On the other hand, Professor Jevons, whose opinion is
worthy of the very greatest weight on such questions, calculates that