ing and typesetting and has the advantage that the labels are more accurate than if the work of one man working without criticism. Some such labels have been prepared by the Dominion government and offered free of charge to all the museums of the Dominion. At least eighteen museums and one zoological garden have taken advantage of this cooperation. A national museum may thus become a clearing house for all the museums of a country.

CONCLUSION

A finished museum would be a dead museum, but there is no such thing as a finished museum, for scientists are always making new discoveries which lead them to add new things, and to rearrange or re-label old material.

The museum that really teaches the children of to-day, and otherwise becomes useful to the public with clean though cheap cases, will gain the sound financial support which it deserves, at least as soon as the children of the present generation grow to positions of authority. The museums certainly have a great opportunity to be open on Sunday and at hours when those who work and all those who wish can make use of them. They may cheer, educate and uplift the humbler workers and the slum dwellers. These are the people, who, unable to travel, or perhaps even to buy books and pictures, may need the services of museums and kindred institutions more than those who have wealth and leisure or any other class. Museums may compete with ignorance and vice by pointing the way to the appreciation or use of things now neglected or unknown, and to greater joys and healthfulness through beauty and knowledge, until there is no room left in the mind for vice. Schools and universities had to struggle for recognition. Only a few years ago some communities looked upon libraries as of little or no importance, but now prize them highly. Museums come next in this evolution. Museum men may not know yet just how to perfect museum work, but if all carry on experiments and evolve useful methods as rapidly as some have during the past. twenty years we may expect that within the next twenty years we shall have some museums at least that will be considered as useful as our best schools and libraries.

MINERAL RESOURCES IN WAR AND THEIR BEARING ON PREPAREDNESS

T

By JOSEPH E. POGUE, PH.D.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AND MINERALOGY,
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

I

HE raw materials of war are men and minerals. The one

stands in immediate contact with the enemy; the other lies back of the organization that supplies the munitions of war. The first has always been recognized as of prime importance; the second has been forced into prominence only by the unprecedented conditions of the European contest. But even now attention is too exclusively focused on the industrial aspects of the problem of preparedness, and too little care has been devoted to the ultimate sources of the materials of war, to a study of mineral resources from a military standpoint.

War has changed from an art to a science. It has come to be a large-scale engineering operation-a conflict of vast quantities of materials, handled by skilled labor, directed by expert knowledge. It is now a matter fundamentally of applied physics, chemistry and geology.

A result of the development of war along material lines has been the tendency to reduce the men on the battlefield to a dead level of equality. The bravest or the most numerous army no longer wins; the victor is the army best equipped, the one with the best home organization back of it-ultimately the troops of the country that commands the largest supply of coal, iron and fertile soil. The present war, indeed, has been termed by various writers "a war of coal and iron," "a war of metals," and the like.

The manufacture of most of the munitions of war, and of actually every implement of fighting, depends upon some mineral resource. Guns, projectiles and armor plate demand iron, copper, zinc, lead, antimony, manganese, nickel, chromium, tungsten, molybdenum; not one, or several, but all. The lack of a critical steel-hardening metal, though used in small quantities only, would render the most extensive iron deposits void for military purposes. This England discovered to her discomfort at the beginning of the War; to her disaster, had com

mand of the seas not been hers. Explosives require nitrogen, sulphur, carbon, aluminum, and certain organic products obtained from the destructive distillation of coal. The railway, the ocean vessel, the motor truck, the aircraft, all depend upon coal or oil and many metals. Without copper and platinum, the telephone and wireless would remain silent. Even the surgeon draws many of his most essential drugs from coal-tar derivatives; while food and clothing, without which all other supplies would avail nothing, are direct or indirect products of the soil, for the quickened production of which potash, phosphates and nitrates must be available in abundance.

And not only must an army be munitioned, it must also be financed; and here a complexity of factors enters, not the least of which is the activity of the mining industry in general and of the supply and output of gold in particular. The fact that at the outbreak of the European war the British Empire had long been producing about three fifths of the world's gold, while the Central Powers were contributing less than 1 per cent., introduced an economic condition whose significance would have been more apparent had circumstances been reversed and Germany, and not the Entente, been the great purchaser of supplies on the American market. The Central Powers could better afford to be without great reserves of ready gold than their enemies.

In a table of the eighty chemical elements composing the universe, I have just counted thirty that are required in modern warfare. Lacking these, or the ability to obtain them, no nation can stand by virtue of superiority in either numbers or quality of men. The want of even a single essential may prove disastrous.

Countries rich in developed resources, therefore, are much better prepared for war than those whose mineral resources are scant or imperfectly developed. In fact, no country can become a great world power without extensive and varied mineral wealth. The British Empire, the German Empire, and the United States have achieved this end; the Russian Empire, China, and a confederation of South American republics, to include at least Brazil, Chile, and Bolivia, have this possibility. Argentina is the most exclusively agricultural country in the world, yet it is certain that she could not obtain a dominant position on that alone; for such an accomplishment, alliances with neighbors rich in minerals would be essential. An embargo on coal shipments from the United States under present circumstances would seriously embarrass, if not disrupt, her economic life.

Germany could not have maintained her stand in the present war had her territory been poor in variety of minerals or had not her chemical skill risen to fill gaps in her natural products. Of essential minerals, she has probably felt a serious stringency only in copper, nickel, aluminum, tin, antimony, manganese, petroleum, and nitrogen; but her chain of strength was kept from breaking at these weaker points by accelerated metallurgical and chemical developments, the extension of mining to low-grade deposits, heavy importations at the outset from Norway and Sweden, and probably also by anticipation and storage of these very products in large quantities in advance of hostilities. Her supply of iron would have proved inadequate if the events of 1871 had not placed in her hands the great iron-ore fields of Lorraine, which more than doubled her reserves of this metal-an advantage not generally appreciated at the time, as a suitable process was then lacking for working these low-grade ores. But their significance became apparent enough in 1914 when the German line embraced the extension of these fields lying in French territory east of Verdun and the French iron industry was thereby deprived at a single stroke of over 85 per cent. of its supply of ore, which was soon diverted into German blast-furnaces. It is surely the irony of fate that Germany to-day is practically waging the war with iron drawn from territory formerly French and worked into steel by a process devised by two Englishmen !

England has abundant iron and coal, but is deficient in most other mineral products of military significance. France is a manufacturing nation with few mineral resources, and of these her most important, the coal and iron fields adjoining Belgium and the German frontier, were captured early in the War. Russia (including Siberia) is a country rich in variety and quantity of minerals, but not only are these resources for the most part undeveloped, but their very distribution and extent are imperfectly known. In consequence, Russia has more men than she can adequately arm and munition. Industrial organization for war is one problem and can be quickly arranged for-behold England; the development of a country's resources is a different matter and can not be accomplished in a brief period of years-that Russia has learned to her loss. Therefore, it has devolved upon the British navy to maintain the command of the seas, not only that England herself might be provisioned, but that her allies might be supplied with the raw materials of war which their own territories alone were unable to furnish.

Looking further, we see in China a region of vast extent with a mineral wealth almost wholly undeveloped, to a large extent unknown, yet shown by successive explorations to be of great potentialities. For this and other obvious reasons, China is unprepared for a struggle with even a third-rate power; yet she has the raw materials of a world power. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Japan, herself rapidly developing to the limit of her restricted territory and resources, is seeking new fields for expansion; she has doubtless many times had visions of what an organized China might be; certainly those who would impute to her ambition designs against the distant shores of California, forget that at her very door lies a country probably nearly as rich in a material way as America ever was. China developed, we may have Japan to reckon with; as it is, the resources of China must appeal to Nippon as more alluring than the vague idea of a Japanese state in North America.

II

Not only is war to-day directly dependent upon mineral resources, but the development of the art of war through the ages has followed rather closely the advancing exploitation of mineral deposits. Stages in the upward progress of primitive man indeed are actually marked by the implements used by him in the chase and in war, according as these were of rough stone, of polished stone, of bronze or of iron. Lucretius, the Roman poet, recognized this fact two thousand years ago when he wrote:

Weapons of old were hands, nails, and teeth, and stones, and boughs broken off trees, and flaming fire, as soon as it had become known. Afterwards the use of iron and copper was discovered, but the use of copper was earlier than that of iron; for it is easier to work and is found in greater quantity.

The accounts of the earliest wars bristle with spears, javelins, helmets, arrows, and catapults-all products, in part at least, of mines and quarries. The stirring lines of Homer resound with the clash of arms, and every school-boy knows the trappings and implements used by Cæsar in pressing his Gallic Wars. Ancient warfare was dependent upon stone, iron, bronze (copper and tin), and oil.

The two greatest inventions of the Middle Ages were printing and gunpowder. But the printing press is not our theme, however much it is dependent on lead and antimony or is now gorging itself on the details of modern fighting. When a German monk by the name of Schwartz (although there are some