THE TEAR 2000.

Otago Witness, Issue 2104, 21 June 1894, Page 44

THE TEAR 2000.

M. Berthelot delivered a remarkable speech at the banquet of the Syndical Chamber of Chemical Product Manufacturers in Paris on April 6. M. Berfchelot's subject was "The World in the Year 2000." After saying that he looked to chemistry for deliverance from present day social evils and for the possibility of realising the Socialists' dreams, that is if a spiritual chemistry could be discovered to change human nature as deeply as chemical science could modify the gloto, he continued :—": — " This change will be greatly due to chemistry utilising the heat of the sun and the oentral heat of the globe. The latter can be obtained by shafts 3000 or 4000 metres in depth. Modern engineers are equal to the task of sinking. Then the water down so deep would be hot and able to keep all possible machinery going. By natural distillation it would furnish fluid frre from microbes and would b8 an unlimited source of chemical and electrical energy. This could be everywhere developed and thousands of years might pass without any noticeable diminution. With such a source of heat all chemical transformation will be easy. The production of alimentary matters will b6 a consequence. This production is in principle resolved, and has been for 40 years, by the syntheses of grease and oils. That of hydrates of carbon is going on, and that of nitrogenous substances is not far off. When energy can be cheaply obtained, food can be made from carbon taken from carbonic acid, hydrogen taken from water, and nitrogen taken from, the air. What work the vegetables have so far done science will soon be able to do better, and with far greater profusion and independently of seasons or evil microbes or insects. There will be then no passion to own land, beasts need not be bred for slaughter, man will be milder and more moral, and barren regions may be preferable to fertile as habitable place?, because they will not be pestiferous from ages of manuring. The reign of chemistry will beautify the planet. There will under it be no need to disfigure it with the geometrical works of the agriculturist, or with the grime of factories and chimneys. It will recover its verdure and flora. The earth will be a vast pleasure garden, and the human race will live in peace and plenty. But it will not be idle, for idleness is not happiness, and work is the source of all virtue. In the earth, renewed by chemistry, people will work more than ever, but according to their special tastes and faculties and from high and noble motives. The great object will be then to develop more and more the jEithetic and the intellectual faculties." A friend of M. Berthelot, meetirg him subsequently, asked him whether he was in sober earnest in relating his dream of the world in the year 2000. He said he was never more serious in his life. What was the state of ecience applied to industry at tbe time that Franklin called on Voltaire 7 The world had then no industrial plant of any consequence — not even in the form of highways. " See," said M. Berthelot, " what it has now, and see what work has been done in the way of boring with diamond-pointed drills worked by compressed air. The spades of the future are being found now in the Pa Beers mines at tbe Cape." It was

remarked to M. Berthelot that ib was much easier to „bbre a tunnel through the Saint Gothard mountain than to sink a shaft to the region of platonic heat. He admitted this, but he had heard from eminent engineers that it was possible to create machinery that would make a high degree of plutonic heat available as an industrial force. Even were they mistaken there were energies going to waste everywhere which could be transformed into electricity and into heat. The quantity of sun«hine stored up in. trees was small com-y&i-A to what was lost. He did not say bow it could be made available for industrial

chemistry, but be felt sure that the problem

was one that might be solved. He was also persuaded that the food supplies of the future lay simply in air and water. Chemistry had only afforded us tbe merest peep at the resources of the planet. The human race was heir to the peaceable kingdom of which

Isaiah — who may have been a great scientist as well as a poet — gave a forecast.