JEVONS, W. Stanley The Coal Question; An Inquiry concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines. London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co. 1865.

JEVONS, W. Stanley The Coal Question; An Inquiry concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines. London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co. 1865.

xix[i] - including frontispiece, 349[1] pp. plus advertisement leaf; perforated library stamp to title-page and final leaf of text; untrimmed. Original cloth, rubbed. First edition.

The frontispiece graph shows the 'Supposed future consumption of Coal' to the year 2000.
In The Coal Question, Jevons covered a breadth of concepts on energy depletion that have recently been revisited by writers covering the subject of peak oil. For example, Jevons explained that improving energy efficiency typically reduced energy costs and thereby increased rather than decreased energy use, an effect now known as Jevons paradox. The Coal Question remains a paradigmatic study of resource depletion theory. Jevons's son, H. Stanley Jevons, published an 800-page follow-up study in 1915 in which the difficulties of estimating recoverable reserves of a theoretically finite resource are discussed in detail. The work had a powerful influence on Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Royal Commission was appointed to investigate the matter.
Pencil inscription on title-page reads from H. Pratt McKean Nov.6/66, with occasional notes to margins in same hand and to rear endpaper. Henry Pratt McKean (1810-1894) of Philadelphia, grandson of Thomas McKean, signer of Declaration of Independence.