The Birmingham age-herald., 1903-09-20

ment In coal, Which has been preserved by the water, the nitrogenous substances having been converted into marsh gas during the process of gradual decay
 This familiar black mud. it should be understood, is the same in composition as much of the peat that for generations has been burned in Ireland though in Scotland the word peat applies only to the product of decayed mosses, heather and other plants that grow on the up- land moors. The black mud of this coun- try Is almost always wet and may be called grass peat; that is to say, it is composed almost entirely of decayed grasses, reeds and small rushes. Examine bit of it from some neighboring swamp or salt marsh and you will easily detect the qualities which have led the insur- ance engineers to have almost unlimited confidence in 1t as a fuel possibility. Sand, grit, stones-in other words, the substances that especially prevent com bustion-are hardly present In it at all. On the other hand, particularly In the portions taken from near the surface of the marsh, sticks and roots frequently ap- pear, half decomposed. It Is therefore. distinctly a vegetable product which may, when dried, be easily decomposed into fine powder that has value as disinfectant.
 Professor Norton has discovered that specimens taken from swamps in eastern Massachusetts weighed at first from 100 to 125 pounds per cubic foot and that after they had been dried in the air for periods varying from three weeks to two months, the weight became reduced to about fifty-five pounds per cubic foot. The mud, moreover, as you may easily discover, becomes quite hard and tough after drying and this hardness Is easily increased by moderate pressure so that the denser samples become quite com parable with pine wood, being difficult to saw, but easy to split with an axe.
 The experiments In colxing mud have yielded some interesting results It has been found, for example, that sun-dried muds will not coke properly. the product appearing in little fragments rather than in complete briquette. Even half dried mud shows a great deal of crumbling when coked; but if an air-dried clod- bone-dry, as the phrase isis coked at high temperature, there results a firm, dense coke which in appearance. hard ness and weight resembles the coke de- rived from soft coal.
 Is this air-dried mud as good? Has it. to use the physicists phrase, an equal calorific power with first qua lity Amer ican coal? That, of course, is one of the questions at issue and these experiments seem to show that a good grade of mud Is not far behind the more highly devel- oped bituminous coal Its calorific power has been discovered to be at least 65 per cent of that of New River coal, which may be taken as a standard for common soft coal. The same percentages apply to the manufactured cokes, with sllsht notifications.
 On the basis of these investigations of Professor Norton's. which were carried out with the aid of the most accurate ap- paratus and methods available at the Massa chusetts Institute of Technology any farmer who owns an acre of bog which runs 20 feet deep, which is by no means rare depth has on his place the raw material of about 40,OO0,O0O pounds of air-dried mud, which is equal in heat ing power to at least 12,000 tons of good coal. Supposing that the farmer used twenty tons a year for household pur- poses his mud bed would therefore keep the family warm for 500 years. The coke and the briquetted mud 1t should be said, both burn with a hot fire, leaving only from to 12 per cent of soft ash. In some of the familiar metallurgical processes the coke has been shown to serve excellently and as a substitute for charcoal in working iron 1t has been proved satisfactory.
 What needs to be done next-so the ar- thorities of the Insurance Engineering Experiment Station beleve-is to make investigations on a somewhat more ex- tensive scale into the purely financial side of the operations involved. They have already shown that 1t can be done; now the query to answer is will 1t pay? Prevented by his position as director of the Insurance Engineering Experiment Station from embarking in any get-rich quick scheme of exploitation of the com mercial possibilities of mud, MT Atkn- son is nevertheless very anxious to dis cover and report, from a purely judicial