But suppose we were to say, “You love a cheerful blaze, can afford to pay for it, and therefore care not how much coal you waste in obtaining it. We also love a cheerful blaze, but have a great aversion to coal-smoke and tarry vapors; and we find that we can make a beautiful fire, quite inoffensive even in the middle of the room, provided we feed it with stale quartern loaves. We know that such fuel is expensive, but can afford to pay for it, and choose to do so.” Would he not be shocked at the sight of the blazing loaves, if this extravagance were carried out? This popular inconsistency of disregarding the waste of a valuable and necessary commodity, of which the supply is limited and unrenewable, while we have such proper horror of wilfully wasting another similar commodity which can be annually replaced as long as man remains in living contact with the earth, will gradually pass away when rational attention is directed to the subject. If the recent very mild suggestion of a coal-famine does something towards placing coal on a similar pedestal of popular veneration to that which is held by the “staff of life,” the million a week that it has cost the coal consumer will have been profitably invested. Many who were formerly deaf to the exhortations of fuel economists are now beginning to listen. “_Forty shillings per ton_” has acted like an incantation upon the spirit of Count Rumford. After an oblivion of more than eighty years, his practical lessons have again sprung up among us. Some are already inquiring how he managed to roast 112 lbs. of beef at the Foundling Hospital with 22 lbs. of coal, and to use the residual heat for cooking the potatoes, and why it is that with all our boasted progress we do not now in the latter third of the nineteenth century, repeat that which he did in the eighteenth. The fact that the consumption of coal in London during the first four months of 1873 has, in spite of increasing population, amounted to 49,707 tons less than the corresponding period of 1872, shows that some feeble attempts have been made to economize the domestic consumption of fuel. One very useful result of the recent scarcity of coal has been the awakening of a considerable amount of general interest in the work of stock-taking, a tedious process which improvident people are too apt to shirk, but which is quite indispensable to sound business proceedings, either of individuals or nations.