VII.
THE FUEL PROBLEM, BUILDING AND
TEXTILE MATERIALS.
With the vast and ever increasing demands made upon
materials which are the products of cultivated fields, for
food, for apparel, for furnishings and for cordage, better
soil management must grow more important as populations
multiply. With the increasing cost and ultimate exhaustion
of mineral fuel; with our timber vanishing rapidly
before the ever growing demands for lumber and paper;
with the inevitably slow growth of trees and the very
limited areas which the world can ever afford to devote
to forestry, the time must surely come when, in short
period rotations, there will be grown upon the farm
materials from which to manufacture not only paper and
the substitutes for lumber, but fuels as well. The complete
utilization of every stream which reaches the sea,
reinforced by the force of the winds and the energy of the
waves which may be transformed along the coast lines,
cannot fully meet the demands of the future for power
and heat; hence only in the event of science and engineering
skill becoming able to devise means for transforming
the unlimited energy of space through which we are ever
whirled, with an economy approximating that which crops
now exhibit, can good soil management be relieved of the
task of meeting a portion of the world's demand for power
and heat.
When these statements were made in 1905 we did not know that for centuries there had existed in China, Korea
