19103 In Wales 



shadow of Tintern Abbey on the banks of the Wye 

 in Monmouthshire, a beautiful site honored in Abbey 

 poetry if not famed in history. In Cardiff we visited 

 W. Evans Hoyle, director of the museum and a 

 helpful colleague of mine on the International Com- 

 mission of Nomenclature. 



Passing on to Swansea, we saw evidences of the Swansea 

 visible decline of that center of the smelting industry, pa 

 for which its position as a seaport and its nearness to 

 mines of coal, iron, and other metals gave it great 

 natural advantages. The essential cause of failure, 

 I was told, lies in reluctance to adopt modern 

 methods. The smelters were built most substantially 

 as permanent structures. Each time before charging, 

 a special trial load is made to fix the amounts of ore, 

 coal, and limestone for slag necessary for the test. 

 Similar establishments in Germany and America 

 leave all this to the chemist, and the much cheaper 

 buildings are seldom emptied during their lifetime. 

 A former laborer in Swansea, revisiting old scenes, 

 told of still finding his name on a smelter where he 

 had written it some forty years before. Meanwhile 

 he "had seen six generations of smelters in Butte, 

 Montana, sent to the scrap-heap." 



The night we had planned to spend at St. David's Hoover 

 in the heart of Wales, but not liking the looks of the atlhe 

 hotel, Hoover characteristically pushed on for another 

 hundred miles till we came to Aberystwith by the 

 Irish Sea. Another time, returning through County 

 Montgomery, we took an enticing cross-road over the 

 moorland hills, and followed it for some miles. But 

 it finally grew so narrow that two vehicles could not 

 pass between the bordering hedges. At last, to our 

 driver's evident distaste, we were forced to enter 



C 3 2 9 3 



