Yet another curious consideration. Let us suppose that one of the
stupid, salamander-like Labyrinthodonts, which pottered, with much belly
and little leg, like Falstaff in his old age, among the coal-forests,
could have had thinking power enough in his small brain to reflect upon
the showers of spores which kept on falling through years and centuries,
while perhaps not one in ten million fulfilled its apparent purpose, and
reproduced the organism which gave it birth: surely he might have been
excused for moralizing upon the thoughtless and wanton extravagance
which Nature displayed in her operations.
But we have the advantage over our shovel-headed predecessor--or
possibly ancestor--and can perceive that a certain vein of thrift runs
through this apparent prodigality. Nature is never in a hurry, and seems
to have had always before her eyes the adage, "Keep a thing long enough,
and you will find a use for it." She has kept her beds of coal many
millions of years without being able to find much use for them; she has
sent them down beneath the sea, and the sea-beasts could make nothing
of them; she has raised them up into dry land, and laid the black veins
bare, and still, for ages and ages, there was no living thing on the
face of the earth that could see any sort of value in them; and it was
only the other day, so to speak, that she turned a new creature out of
her workshop, who by degrees acquired sufficient wits to make a fire,
and then to discover that the black rock would burn.
I suppose that nineteen hundred years ago, when Julius Caesar was good
enough to deal with Britain as we have dealt with New Zealand, the
primaeval Briton, blue with cold and woad, may have known that the
strange black stone, of which he found lumps 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 full return of
the capital she had invested in the 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 modern 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 condition of this growth and
development as carbonic acid is for that of a club-moss. Wanting coal,
we could not have smelted the iron needed to make our engines, nor have
worked our engines when we had 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 can
live where now ten thousand are amply supported.
Thus, all this abundant wealth of money and of vivid life is Nature's
interest upon her investment in club-mosses, and the like, so long ago.
But what becomes of the coal which is burnt in yielding this 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 the 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 most notable of housekeepers!