Mineral Resources

IT has been said, with a considerable measure of truth, that one of the decisive factors in war is the accessibility of either side to essential minerals. These include in addition to iron, as the basis of steel, various less widely spread minerals such as the ores of nickel, manganese, titanium, tungsten, etc., and also the ores of copper, zinc, lead, aluminium, etc., and of course coal and above all mineral oil. The statistical summary for the years 1936-38 afforded by this issue of an annual publication* is specially valuable in giving, for most metals, the amount of the ores produced in each territory of the British Empire and also, in many cases, the metal content of the ore.