Iron the most valuable of Metals—Its wide Diffusion over the Earth—Meteoric Iron—Iron very anciently known—Extension of its Uses in Modern Times—British Iron Production—Causes of its Rise—Hot Blast—Puddling—Coal-smelting—The Cleveland District—Rapid Rise of Middlesborough—British Iron Ores—Production of Foreign Countries—The Magnetic Mountain in Russia—The Eisenerz Mountain in Styria—Dannemora—Elba—The United States—The Pilot Knob—The Cerro del Mercado.

As an instrument of civilisation iron is the most valuable and the most indispensable of all mineral substances. Even coal is of inferior importance to the welfare of mankind, for iron may be obtained without its aid, while coal could not possibly be extracted from the bowels of the earth without the assistance of iron. Hard and malleable, tenacious and ductile, endowed with the singular property of welding, which is found in no other metal except platinum, and acquiring new qualities by its conversion into steel, it accommodates itself to all our wants and even to our caprices, so that no other metal has such various and extensive uses. It clothes our war ships with a case of impenetrable armour, and sets the finest watch in motion; it provides the sempstress with her needle, and guides the mariner over the ocean; it furnishes the husbandman with his ploughshare, and the soldier with his sword; it concentrates in the steam-engine the sinews of a thousand horses, and mocks on the railroad the fleetness of the swiftest courser. It is, in one word, the embodiment of power, the chief agent of all social progress.

‘Were the use of iron lost among us,’ says the illustrious Locke, ‘we should, in a few ages, be unavoidably reduced to the wants and ignorance of the ancient savage Americans;’ nor will this view be deemed extravagant if we reflect that, but for iron, man would be virtually without tools, since it is almost the only metal capable of taking a sharp edge and keeping it.

The bounty of the Creator, which bestowed on man this inestimable gift, has also provided for its wider diffusion over the earth than is the case with any other of the useful metals. Few mineral substances or stones are without an admixture of it. Sands, clays, the waters of rivers or springs, are scarcely ever perfectly free from iron, while animal and vegetable substances likewise afford it in the residues which they leave after incineration. Its mines may truly be said to be inexhaustible; in some its ores occur in compact masses of extraordinary magnitude, in others they spread in vast strata or extend in veins of a prodigious length.

Yet, in spite of its wide diffusion, the extraction of iron from its ores generally requires so much metallurgic skill that its use would probably have remained undiscovered by the ancients if Providence had not in a wonderful manner revealed, as it were, its existence to mankind.

All iron of a terrestrial origin is combined with other substances, which conceal its true nature from the uninitiated eye, and from which it is with difficulty separated; but here and there, scattered over the surface of the earth, are found solitary masses of metallic iron, which, having fallen from the skies, may truly be called erratic boulders from another world. The idea of their having dropped from the clouds was long ridiculed by the learned; but their fall has been so often observed, and so circumstantially recorded in the annals of almost every age, that scepticism has been obliged to yield to the weight of accumulated evidence, and science no longer doubts their meteoric origin. Nothing can be more interesting than these mysterious heralds from the distant fields of ether, which, after wandering through space for countless ages, have at length been brought within the sphere of attraction of our planet, and, alighting on its surface, afford us tangible proofs that many of the substances of which our earth is composed—iron, nickel, silex, &c., &c.—exist beyond its limits, and that most probably our whole solar system is constructed of the same materials as our globe.

But meteoric iron—which sometimes occurs in enormous masses^[56]—is more than a mere object of curiosity, for it has had a most important influence on the progress of the human race. On such a mass undoubtedly the first smith exercised his skill, and it was this which first made mankind acquainted with a metal more valuable than copper or gold.

As we see from the example of the Esquimaux, whom Captain Ross (1819) found in possession of knives and harpoons which they had made from masses of meteoric iron, the discovery was probably made at a very remote period, while man was still in the savage state; but iron having once become known, the desire to obtain it in larger quantities from other sources naturally grew with the progress of civilisation, and gradually led to the knowledge of its ores and of the art of utilising them. Thus there can hardly be a doubt that iron-smelting was practised long before historic times. In India and China the origin of its use loses itself in the remotest antiquity; and the imposing monuments of ancient Egypt, many of which are at least five thousand years old, could not possibly have been erected without the aid of iron. In the Book of Deuteronomy (iv. 20) the land of Egypt is compared to an iron-furnace—a figurative expression which shows that even at that early period iron-smelting must have been a well-known branch of industry.

The iron weapons found in the lacustrine dwellings of Switzerland likewise point to a very ancient use of iron in Central Europe, no less than the fact mentioned by CÆsar, that during the siege of Avaricum (Bourges) the works erected by the Romans for taking the town were repeatedly destroyed by the subterranean galleries of the besieged, who, as the conqueror relates, were accustomed to such underground labour from their habitually working in iron-mines, an industry which, to judge from this passage, must even then have been of ancient date in Gaul.

For many ages the uses of iron remained chiefly confined to the instruments of agriculture and of war—to the ploughshare and the sword. With the progress of civilisation its employment extended to many purposes unknown before; and in our times the construction of ships and buildings, of railroads and bridges, absorbs quantities which would have appeared incredible almost within the memory of living man. Hence the manufacture of iron has made more rapid progress since the beginning of the present century than in any former period of the world’s history, and even the present immense production scarcely keeps pace with a demand to which it is not easy to assign a limit.

Among the iron-producing countries of the globe Great Britain occupies by far the first rank, and there is every reason to believe that it will long continue to maintain it. The British ores, indeed, are generally poor, as clay, silica, phosphorus, and a variety of impurities which are with difficulty separated from the metal, enter into the composition of those which supply the greatest part of our iron; but this deficiency is more than counterbalanced by many advantages. Most of the British iron mines are situated in those districts where coal is cheapest, the ore being often even raised from the same pit as that from which the coal is extracted. Limestone, the necessary flux, is at hand, while fire-clay, no unimportant article in the building of the furnaces, on whose long-continued working so much depends, is found in the same ground as the ore itself. The largest and most complete manufactories have long been established in the most convenient places. With an almost unlimited amount of capital, the most perfect and the cheapest communication by water is open to all parts of the world; and the further processes which the metal has to undergo are performed at once on the spot in the best manner and at the smallest possible expense. No other land can boast of equal or greater facilities for the production of an unlimited quantity of cheap iron, so that, even with the assistance of heavy protective duties, most of the iron-producing countries of Europe find it difficult to compete in their own markets with the produce of Great Britain.

The art of making iron in this country is of very ancient though of unascertained date. It was probably found by the Romans in a far advanced state. It certainly was carried on by them subsequently to a great extent—a fact proved by the immense beds of iron cinders discovered in the Forest of Dean; nor has it ever been discontinued by the other races who in succession have held sway in the island. But, though of such ancient origin, and enjoying so many natural advantages, our iron manufacture remained confined within very narrow limits so long as the ore was exclusively smelted by means of charcoal made from wood. The manufacture was even for some time partially prohibited in England, the consumption of wood-charcoal in the process of smelting being so great as to create apprehensions that, if care were not taken of the remaining forests, enough timber would not be left to supply the wants of the navy. It seems almost incredible in our days that Acts were passed in the reigns of Elizabeth and James forbidding the felling of timber for the smelting of iron, except in certain districts of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey, then the principal seats of the manufacture, and even there the erection of new works was expressly forbidden.

Attention was then directed to the smelting of ironstone by means of pit coal. Amongst others, Lord Dudley gallantly struggled to establish a manufactory in the neighbourhood of Stourbridge, and partially succeeded; but what with riots among the ironworkers, who destroyed his works, and the wars of the Great Rebellion, which ruined his fortune, he reaped no advantage from his enterprise. Nothing contributed to arrest the decline in this branch of trade, and towards the middle of last century the number of furnaces, which in the reign of James I. had amounted to 300, fell off to 59, the total make of which amounted to not more than 17,350 tons, being an average of 294 tons per annum for each furnace, a quantity very little exceeding that sometimes made in a single week in some of the huge furnaces in Wales in the present day. The partial use of pit coal in the process of smelting was revived in Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire, about 1713. The chief difficulty was to keep the coal in a state of combustion sufficiently intense for the purpose of smelting the ore; the hand-worked bellows, or the more powerful water movement, which produced blast enough for charcoal, having comparatively little effect upon coal.

This obstacle was finally overcome through the perseverance and enterprise of Dr. John Roebuck (a physician in Birmingham, and grandfather of the late distinguished member for Sheffield), who, seeking for more economical methods of smelting iron ore than those then in use, founded in 1759 the now celebrated Carron Works, where John Smeaton, the illustrious architect of the Eddystone lighthouse, first introduced (1760) a new contrivance for throwing a powerful and constant blast into the furnace. By means of a forcing pump, a large column of air, of triple or quadruple density to that which had been previously obtained, could now be poured into the furnace; and effects equivalent to this great improvement followed. The same smelting oven that formerly yielded ten or twelve tons weekly now sometimes produced forty tons in the same period; and such was the impulse given to the trade by this unexpected success of a powerful blast with pit coal that in 1788 the manufacture of pig-iron in England, Wales, and Scotland amounted to 68,300 tons, being an increase of 50,950 tons on the quantity manufactured previous to the introduction of pit coal.

In 1782 Mr. Cort, after many years of experiments, discovered the means of converting cast or pig-iron into malleable iron by a process which was at once sure, rapid, and economical. The iron is remelted in a puddling furnace, as it is called, which is heated with raw coal, and there, by a series of operations, the object of which is to give the iron malleability and toughness by expelling the carbon, it is manipulated until it acquires the consistency of a solid white-hot ball. In this shape it is subjected to the action of an enormous hammer, by which the coarser parts are beaten from it, and it is formed into the shape of thick short bars, called blooms or slabs. While still red-hot it is passed through a series of grooved rollers, till it is drawn out into a long bar, the exact dimensions of which are regulated by the requirements of the manufacture for which it is destined. The bars thus made are technically called puddled bars, and considered as half-manufactured iron. To refine them into merchant-iron, they are again submitted to the action of fire, and, when hot enough, are welded together and formed into the various denominations of bars, rods, hoops, sheets, or plates. Mr. Cort’s discovery, though of immense importance, would yet have proved of comparatively small value without the aid of the double-power steam-engine, which was about the same time invented by James Watt, and supplied the power which was needed to give our iron-works their full development.

Hitherto the ‘top measures’ only of the mineral had been worked, and generally on ‘the rise of the mine,’ where the water would not lie, or those strata favourably situated on the side of a hill where levels could be driven in and the water released. Water was the great enemy in the pits, and even in shallow workings it often accumulated faster than a gin turned by horse-power could bring it to the surface. By the new agency of steam the deepest pits were drained, and materials were drawn up from the bowels of the earth in a quantity and with a rapidity and security hitherto unknown. By the same means that prodigious blast was obtained for the furnaces to which all subsequent improvements of the manufacture owe their origin. Instead of the rude machinery of waterwheels and bellows, huge engines of enormous power forced an immense volume of air through several small tuyeres or tubes so disposed at the lower part of the furnaces that in each portion of the ignited mass an equally diffused blast might raise an equal intensity of heat. Furnaces of greater height and much larger capacity than any hitherto known were erected, and in its general aspect the iron manufacture assumed very much the appearance which it maintains at the present day.

Most readers are aware^[57] that the flaming towers which give such an unearthly effect at night to what is called the Black Country, round Wolverhampton, are iron furnaces, and that the projecting circular galleries which surround their tops are contrived for pouring down their capacious throats, by apertures placed at equal distances, an equable and regular supply of the materials with which they are fed. Besides the iron-stone and the fuel, there is needed a third substance, which is called ‘a flux,’ because it forms a fusible compound with the earthy matter of the mineral. When we are acquainted with the foreign matter in combination with the ore, chemistry tells us what substance we ought to add for the purpose of eliminating the metal. Among the wonderful provisions of nature for the convenience of man, none is more remarkable than that by which many substances are fusible in conjunction at a temperature which either could resist separately. The British ores are for the most part argillaceous, that is to say, they are combined with what, in its general character and appearance, resembles clay. To all such limestone in due proportion must be added; but if the earthy matter consists of lime, clay is the proper flux. In either case the foreign matter and the flux are fused into one substance. The liberated iron sinks downwards, and having now itself become fusible by the combination of carbon, with which it has been impregnated by the fuel, it melts as it reaches the point of fusion, and settles down in the lowest part of the furnace, otherwise called the hearth. It is followed by the scoria, slag, or ‘cinder’ (as it is always called in the trade), composed of the flux, the foreign matter of the ores, and the ashes of the fuel, which are now in a vitrified state; and this artificial lava, being of much less specific gravity, rests on the surface of the iron and protects it from the action of the blast. The furnace is ‘continued in blast,’ that is to say, in full operation, and must be fed equably and constantly night and day, till the manufacturer thinks fit to blow it out, either for the purpose of repairing it, or of reducing his make of iron. At certain intervals, generally twice in the twenty-four hours, the furnace is tapped; that is to say, the stoppage of sand which closes an orifice at the bottom is knocked away, the liquefied metal rushes out, and is guided successively into moulds of sand in the form of short thick bars, which, by a rude metaphor, as old as the invention of casting, are called ‘pigs,’ while the main channel down which the red-hot torrent flows is called the ‘sow.’

The invention of the hot blast gave a new and mighty impulse to the production of iron. Though Mr. Scrivenor^[58] mentions the remarkable fact that in the furnaces of Peru a contrivance has been noticed for letting the air pass over hot coals, and thus become heated in its passage to the fire, yet it was personal observation, and not archÆological research, that, in 1829, suggested to Mr. Neilson, of the Clyde Iron Works, the possibility of economising fuel by substituting hot for cold air in blowing his furnaces. Before this important discovery more than eight tons of coke had been required to produce one ton of pig-iron; but on heating the blast, previously to its entering the smelting-oven, to a temperature of 300° F., it was found that a saving of two and a half tons of coal could be made on every ton of iron, and on raising it to the temperature of 600° F.—a heat somewhat more than sufficient to melt lead—a still more considerable saving of fuel was effected, while at the same time the important discovery was made that at this high temperature bituminous and even anthracitic coal might be used instead of coke. Another advantage was that the same steam power now sufficed for applying the blast to four furnaces which had formerly been required for three; and the total result of the improvement was a saving of 72 per cent. of fuel. Thus we have here another instance of the important results that may be gained from a single good idea when worked out by clever practical men, for the hot blast has most assuredly increased the wealth of England by many millions a year!

Another circumstance likewise tended considerably to increase the production of pig-iron. It was found that the hot blast not only had power sufficient to produce in the raw coal the requisite intensity of heat, but also to expel from it, to a certain extent, the sulphur, which injured the quality of the iron, and thus a great economy in labour as well as in the quantity of fuel was effected. Since then the black-band, an iron-stone found in great quantities in Scotland, and also, to a less extent, in Wales, but not readily convertible into iron by the old methods, and also the Northamptonshire and the Cleveland ores, discoveries of a later date and of an incalculable extent, have been made by the hot blast to yield their iron in great abundance.

The power of using the black-band alone in the furnace, and not, as before the introduction of the hot blast, in small quantities only, and combined with other ores, constituted a new era in the manufacture of iron, and gave to Scotland, till then an iron-making district of little importance,^[59] the pre-eminence over all others for the production of soft fluid iron, best suited to ordinary founding purposes.

The Cleveland district, formerly unknown in metallurgy, is now the seat of a vast industry, keeping more than a hundred furnaces in blast.

The head-quarters of this new iron-country are established at Middlesborough, on whose site there existed but one house in 1829, but which in 1861 had grown into a town of 24,000 inhabitants, and still increases at the rate of 1,000 a year. Branch railways bring the stone here for smelting from all the neighbouring quarries, and the dense cloud of smoke that hangs over the place serves as a land-mark, not only from the high ground of Yorkshire, but even from some parts of Westmoreland.

But Middlesborough, ‘the youngest child of England’s enterprise’ as it has been called by Mr. Gladstone, is by no means one of the loveliest of her offspring. Scarcely a blade of grass and not a single tree relieves the dull monotony of its dreary streets of small houses, darkened by perpetual smoke, which, as the wind sways it, affords, at rare intervals, glimpses of distant hills or of the Tees, serving only to make the prison of a town more gloomy. Mines and furnaces have also been established in other parts of the district—in Rhosdale, at Grosmont near Whitby, and elsewhere—and not a year passes without the opening of new veins and the rising of new smoke-clouds amid the lovely dales of north-western Yorkshire. The iron which eventually finds its way to Middlesborough is sent thence to every part of the world. Its quality is essentially inferior to that derived from the coal-measures; but for ordinary purposes, and for mixing with the finer classes, it is of great value. Looking to the future, we cannot doubt that the Middlesborough district is destined to have no rival in any part of the world, for even now its works compete in magnitude with those of our old iron fields.

A material which had hitherto been thrown away was also, by the agency of the hot blast, made available for the purposes of the iron master. The ‘tap cinder,’ or refuse of the puddling furnace, which is not to be confounded with the cinder of the blast furnace, contains a considerable percentage of metal, and when thrown again into the furnace greatly increases the yield, though it proportionally deteriorates the quality of the iron. The results of all these successive discoveries and innovations, aided by the facilities of transport afforded by canals and railroads, are truly astonishing.

The make of iron which, on the introduction of steam, had suddenly risen to nearly 50,000 tons per annum, reached 125,000 in 1796, and in 1806 had advanced to nearly 260,000. In 1825 the make was nearly 600,000 tons; in 1840 it amounted to 1,300,000 tons; and in 1854 to 2,700,000 tons. In 1865 it reached the enormous figure of 4,819,254 tons—as much as the combined production of Continental Europe and the United States; and there is little doubt that the present yield does not fall much short of 6,000,000 tons! A similar colossal expansion is without a parallel in the annals of metallurgic industry.

The chief districts which furnish this incredible quantity of iron are situated in Yorkshire, South Wales, Staffordshire, Durham, Lancashire, Cumberland, Shropshire, Derbyshire, and the West of Scotland.

The number of furnaces in blast in 1865 were, in England 376, distributed over 176 iron-works; in Wales 135, distributed over 49 works; and in Scotland 141, over 32. To supply these furnaces there were raised 9,910,045 tons of ore, the estimated value of which at the place of production was 3,324,804l., that of the pig-iron, at the mean average cost at the place of production, being 12,048,133l.

Of the iron-stone, 1,384,500 tons were argillaceous carbonate from the coal-measures of Staffordshire and Worcestershire; 3,166,000 tons from the Yorkshire mines; nearly 1,500,000 tons from the coal-measures of North andand South Wales, and 1,500,000 tons argillaceous carbonate from Scotland.

Of the red hematites of Whitehaven and Ulverstone, which consist almost entirely of peroxide of iron, and are reckoned among our best ores, 214,433 tons were smelted at the spot, and 937,386 tons exported for the supply of Staffordshire, South Wales, and other districts.

The brown hematite (brown oxide of iron) of the Forest of Dean, where the ore exists in almost unlimited quantity, is raised exclusively for shipment to the iron-works of South Wales. Though not rich, yet, from the great masses in which it is found, its cost of production is very low.

The finest iron ores, such as the black oxide or magnetite, specular iron, and spathose iron, or sphÆrosiderite, which furnish the best kinds of iron, are unfortunately but of rare occurrence in Great Britain.

As we see by the following table^[60] of the production of cast iron in the chief European mining States—

France occupied the next rank to Great Britain in 1864; but since 1866 Prussia, besides the rapid development of the iron industry in Westphalia and the Rhenish provinces, has acquired new and valuable mines by the annexation of Hanover and Nassau. Her production had consequently risen to 1,000,000 tons in 1868, and probably the time is not far distant when she will have outstripped France. Nassau possesses inexhaustible supplies of specular iron ore of a remarkable purity, which not only feed the blast furnaces of Westphalia, but are also largely exported to England.

In proportion to the smallness of her territory Belgium rivals Great Britain in the production of iron, supplied exclusively by the brown oxide (brown hematite), and surpasses the vast empire of the Czar.

But Russia has the advantage over all the countries previously mentioned of possessing inexhaustible deposits of magnetic iron ore (magnetic loadstone—magnetite) which affords bar-iron of the very best quality; and though hitherto the immense distances which separate the mines from the larger centres of consumption have retarded the progress of the iron manufacture, the construction of railroads is gradually overcoming these obstacles, and possibly even the now unworked Siberian mines of the AltaÏ and of Transbaikalia, where coal is found along with iron, may acquire importance at a not far distant time. At present the chain of the Oural (Permia and Orenburg) furnishes nine-tenths of all the iron produced in the empire. The most remarkable of the Ouralian mines is the famous magnetic mountain Wissokaja Gora, in the neighbourhood of Nishne-Tagilsk, which Peter the Great bestowed in 1702 on the armourer Nikita Demidoff of Tula, along with a vast extent of forests and arable land. This magnetic mountain or hill, which is 300 fathoms long, 250 broad, and 240 feet high, rises from the midst of a plain, in the form of a broad, flat eminence. It consists almost entirely of pure magnetic iron ore, and is worked like an open quarry; but, on account of its hardness, the ore requires to be blasted with powder. Although many millions of tons have been extracted from it since it first came into the possession of the Demidoff family, it may easily be imagined that a mass of at least 600,000,000 cubic feet of iron-ore is not easily removed, and will outlast the labours of many generations. The quantity of cast-iron annually produced amounts to 25,500 tons, which is converted, partly at Nishne-Tagilsk and partly in the neighbouring forges, into bar-iron, anchors, kettles, scythes, nails, wire, &c. The excellent quality of the iron allows it to be rolled into very thin plates, which are frequently made use of in Russia for the roofing of houses, and are also manufactured at Nishne-Tagilsk into lacquered wares, which find a ready sale throughout the whole of European and Asiatic Russia.

The iron-working industry of Austria has its chief seats in Styria, Carinthia, Transylvania, and Bohemia, and, though out of proportion with the vast natural resources of the empire, has of late made rapid progress. The ores, which are of an excellent quality, are mostly smelted with charcoal, as they are generally situated at a great distance from the coal mines. The Noric or Styrian iron has enjoyed an excellent reputation ever since the time of the Romans, when the imperial manufactory of Laureacum on the Danube supplied the legions with swords and javelins.

In a pass of the Styrian Alps, between the valleys of the Mur and the Enns, lies one of the most remarkable iron mines in the world, the famous Erzberg or iron-mountain, which rises to a height of 3,000 feet, and whose summit and sides are almost everywhere coated with a thick mantle of the richest ore. Authentic records show that it has been worked ever since the year 712; and probably the Romans derived a part of their Noric iron from this source, as the ore is not here concealed in the bowels of the earth, but crops out on the surface, near a mountain pass which was undoubtedly known to them. As at Nishne-Tagilsk, the ore thus conveniently situated is quarried from the mountain, and thus in course of time extensive excavations or grottoes have been formed all over its surface, affording a most interesting spectacle. The bottom of these iron-stone pits is irregularly strewn with large blocks of ore through which wind narrow footpaths. Roads lead from one pit to the other, and close by are situated the small huts in each of which ten or twenty of the miners sleep as long as the working season lasts, for their families generally live lower down in the deeper valleys. On the top of the mountain stands a colossal crucifix of iron, near which an annual thanksgiving feast is celebrated. Though the mines are easily worked, the conveyance of their produce to the smelting-ovens of Eisenerz and Vordernberg is a matter of much greater difficulty, and requires numerous tram-roads, galleries, and shafts, through which the ore is precipitated from a higher to a lower level. At the foot of the mountain they all unite in one main shaft, which leads into a gallery ornamented with a monumental gate. Thus the whole of the Erzberg is covered with various machines, pits, horizontal and vertical galleries, tunnels, and roads, and represents as it were a mine turned inside out, where all the operations which are elsewhere performed underground are, as at the Carclaze tin-mine in Cornwall, exposed to the open day. Here, instead of dirty and dangerous ladders, convenient footpaths, bordered with trees and illumined by the sun, lead from gallery to gallery and from pit to pit, and instead of being confined in dismal passages, the miner enjoys magnificent views of the grandest Alpine scenery. The annual produce of the Erzberg amounts to 25,000 tons of excellent iron, as the ore (sparry iron, carbonate of iron, sphÆrosiderite) is nearly as pure as the magnetic iron-stone of Russia, and affords natural steel with the greatest facility. The railroad now being built in Styria will no doubt greatly increase this production, which might be continued for many thousand years without exhausting the vast mineral wealth which Nature has here deposited.

Though Sweden furnishes but an insignificant quantity of iron when measured by an English scale, yet, in point of quality, its produce is unrivalled in the world. The purest iron-ores (magnetic iron-stone) abound in the mountain chains which traverse the kingdom, and immense forests afford almost inexhaustible supplies of charcoal for their smelting, so that hitherto the want of roads has alone prevented the production of iron from attaining dimensions equal to the natural resources of the country. Many of the richest mines, particularly in the more northern provinces, have never yet been worked, as for instance the enormous mounds of magnetic iron-ore at Gellivara (67° N. lat.) in Swedish Lapland, beyond the Arctic circle, which, from their situation in a polar desert, have hitherto been totally useless. In 1865 an attempt was made to utilize them by means of a railroad and the canalization of the river Luleo, but after a heavy expense the works were finally abandoned.

Thus the manufacture of iron, which, under more favourable circumstances, would reach as far as its ores extend, is confined to Dalecarlia, the more central provinces of Kopperberg, Wermland, and Upsala, where the celebrated mines of Dannemora, which furnish the fine Oeregrund iron, largely imported into England for the manufacture of steel, deserve our particular notice, both for their ancient renown and their wild and colossal grandeur. An excellent road leads from the famous university town of Upsala to Old Upsala, old and hoary in the fullest sense of the word, for its church dates from the Pagan times, and close by rise three tumuli which, according to popular tradition, contain the remains of no less important personages than Odin, Thor, and the divine Freya.

Further on towards the north-east, six geographical miles from Upsala, lie the iron-works of Oesterby, remarkable for their beautiful situation in a natural park of forests and lakes, and thence half an hour’s walk over the plain brings one to the far-famed pit of Dannemora.

The country around is perfectly level, a succession of pine-woods and open grounds, and no sign announces the vicinity of the mine, until at length the traveller sees a few huts and some machines for lifting the ore, and then suddenly stands on the brink of an enormous pit, or rather of a vast crater, whose black and precipitous walls inclose an area of at least a mile in circumference. On looking down into the abyss, which descends to a depth of 450 feet, and is here and there enlivened with patches of perennial snow, he perceives along its black walls the still blacker entrances to labyrinthine caves fringed in some parts with long stalactites of ice of aquamarine transparency and colour. From some of these hollows the flames of piles of fir-wood are seen to creep along the hard rock which they are to soften, and the deep gulf is animated by troops of miners, the distant clang of whose hammers, closely resembling the clicking of a number of clocks, forms a strange concert with the creaking noise of the machinery. Attracted by the novelty of the interesting sight, the eye wanders from one object to another, and time steals on rapidly and unperceived—when suddenly a bell tolls, and the scene as suddenly changes.

It is noon, and the tuns, which before were hauled up from the deep laden with ore, are now seen ascending with a living freight—men, women, and children—standing quite unconcernedly on the narrow edge of the tub, and holding with one hand the chain to which it is attached.

Soon a deathlike silence reigns in the pit—a striking contrast with the noise and life it erewhile displayed—and now loud shouts are heard, warning all those who may have remained behind that the battery prepared during the previous working hours is about to explode. Again a profound silence—and then loud thunder bursts forth, with many an echo, from the depth of the abyss.

For several minutes the whole neighbourhood trembles as if shaken by an earthquake. Through the black clouds of smoke which ascend from the gulf, pieces of stone or ore are hurled upwards, frequently far beyond the brink of the pit, and most of the detonations are followed by the crash of the falling fragments rent by the explosion from the mother-rock.

For many centuries this remarkable mine has afforded employment to many hundreds of workmen, without showing any signs of exhaustion, for its mighty mass of magnetic iron-ore descends to an unknown depth and seems to be practically inexhaustible.

Though the mineral resources of Spain are immense, yet its iron-industry is so little developed that more than two-thirds of the excellent ores of Biscay, instead of being smelted in the country, are exported to France and England.

In Italy the red oxide and magnetic iron-stone mines of Elba have been celebrated since the remotest antiquity, but, from the want of fuel on the island, their entire produce, which amounts to about 100,000 tons, is exported to the coast of Italy, to France, and to England. The principal mines are situated on the slope of a steep mountain fronting the sea, and are divided by horizontal terraces into five stories or huge steps communicating with each other by means of oblique roads, on which carts convey the ores to the shore. Though worked for more than 2,000 years, the mines, which occupy about 700 workmen, are apparently able to supply the wants of the remotest posterity.

On turning to America we find the United States making gigantic strides in the extension of their iron manufacture, which has risen from 347,000 tons in 1840 to 1,200,000 tons in 1864; and as here none of the elements of progress are wanting—a boundless mineral wealth, liberal institutions, which allow the freest scope to individual energy, and an unrivalled spirit of enterprise—there can hardly be a doubt that finally the United States must become the first iron-country in the world. The masses of magnetic iron-stone and red oxide which extend along Lake Superior, over a length of 120 miles and a breadth of from five to thirty, would alone suffice to provide for the wants of the whole of the human race for many thousands of years. They only began to be worked in 1849; and in 1866 the railroad which leads from the mines transported 204,454 tons of ore.

The thriving town of Marquette, the central point of this new seat of industry, was, scarcely twenty years ago, a complete wilderness, where the Red Indian pursued the beasts of the forest, unconscious that the treasures concealed beneath his natal soil would one day be the cause of his expulsion from the hunting-grounds of his fathers.

The State of Missouri possesses two ‘iron-mountains’ similar to the magnetic mountain of the Demidoff: one of them called Pilot Knob is 600 feet high, the other 220. An immense mass of magnetic oxide has also been discovered in California, near the northern extremity of the Sierra Nevada. But though iron is found in abundance in many parts of the Union, (Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Georgia, &c.), the States of New York and Pennsylvania produce by far the greatest quantity.

Brazil and the island of Cuba likewise contain vast deposits of the richest iron-ores; and in Mexico we find the famous Cerro del Mercado, an iron-mountain 633 feet high, which rises in grotesque form from the valley of Durango. This wonderful mound has been calculated to contain 3,244,000,000 cubic feet, or 454,000,000 tons, of magnetic iron ore, capable of yielding 290,000,000 tons of cast iron, or more than fifty times the annual production of Great Britain! A more industrious and civilised race would here find a boundless field for profitable employment; but the indolent Mexican, steeped in ignorance and falling from one revolution into another, still leaves these treasures almost untouched, and, neglecting the vast resources of his country, draws nearly his whole supply of iron from the distant forges of Great Britain.