Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/118

 104 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Platinum is found in Columbia, Brazil, Hayti, Canada, Borneo, and in the Ural.

Finally, coal which supplies our economic and domestic life, abounds in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Argentine Repub- lic, Peru, New Zealand, China, Siberia, northern Hindoostan, in France, in Northumberland, Staffordshire, Lancashire, in Belgium, and in the Rhine provinces.

Each of these mineralogical zones coincides with special industrial zones which are formed in proportion as each kind of mineral is susceptible of being socially utilized ; each coexists with societary structures, at first local and narrowly limited ; but we see these local centers gradually blended into a general and common activity. Gold and silver, for example, are drawn into the stream of universal circulation, into the service, not of iso- lated societies, but of a civilization the circle of which increases every day. They become special organs in the service of interna- tional economic life, and not solely of national life, to such a degree that they are not always and necessarily the most abundant in the countries which produce them.

Modern industry, with its increasing division of labor which, however, is only the negative aspect of an equally increasing co-operation becomes a substitute, in part, for the natural dispersion of the mineral beds which feed a progressive and superior concentration, which implies an increasing lowering of the natural limits in accordance with that which we have already observed from the purely geographical point of view.

When to the heat and motor force derived from combustible minerals electricity was added, then the world was ripe for its unitary and conscious life.

G. DE GREEF.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.

\To be continued^