e.,_ eighty-six years), [Footnote: Van Hise,
p. 48] and that of natural gas in twenty-five years (i. e., twenty-one
years from 1914). [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 56.]
Iron, the metal which the Indians worshipped as a spirit when they first
saw it in the hands of the French, a substance so precious that their name
for it meant "all kinds of good," has, too, been taken with feverish haste
from its ancient places. Joliet and Marquette saw deposits of this ore
near the mouth of the Ohio in 1673, but it was a century and a half before
the harvesting of this crop, down among the rocks for millions of years
before, began. And now, if no new fields are found and the increased use
goes on at the rate of the last three decades, all the available high-
grade ore will have become pig iron and steel billets, bridges, battle-
ships, sky-scrapers, and locomotives, and all kinds of goods, within the
next three decades. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 68.]
The forests of the United States--the forests primeval, with the voice of
whose murmuring pines and hemlocks Longfellow begins his sad story of the
Acadians--contained approximately one billion acres, [Footnote: Van Hise,
p.
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