THE WORLDS ANNUAL METAL CROP 277 



it amounts to over six hundred million tons. Such a mass will meas- 

 ure up nearly twenty-six billion cubic feet. Put this into the form 

 of a pyramid, with a base ten thousand feet square (about twenty- 

 three hundred acres) and its height would be nearly eight hundred 

 feet. Or, cut down the base to dimensions of a five thousand foot 

 square (say sixty acres) and the structure would be nearly two thirds 

 of a mile high. It may not be so difficult then to agree with the iron 

 producers who claim that another half century of such strenuous 

 civilization as the last one will serve to exhaust all the known great 

 iron deposits of the world. Who of the generation that saw the Civil 

 War would have imagined such an expansion of an industry that 

 was then but lightly regarded even by economists? It is indeed high 

 time for the chemists and metallurgists of the day to redouble their 

 efforts to solve the problem of the cheap production of aluminum, 

 for in that direction only does there seem to be an escape from the 

 dilemma of a world unable to procure the common metal it needs, if 

 its civilization is to continue. 



Lead 



In the case of lead we come down to more ordinary figures, yet 

 none the less surprising when the services the metal gives us, by 

 reason of its peculiar qualities, are considered. Without lead, no 

 paint, no shot or bullets, no flexible piping. These are the three 

 principal uses to which it is put in these days, and more than half of 

 the annual crop of the mines becomes paint, and is employed to pro- 

 tect and improve the appearance of the structures that man raises 

 to live, and to transact his business in. In 1885 the world turned out 

 391,542 tons of the metal. Lead is a dense and heavy substance, 

 and it only requires a cube measuring a short seventeen inches along 

 its edges to weigh a ton. Even so, the production of the year 1885 

 would make a mass covering a quarter of an acre of ground, and 

 standing nearly one hundred and ten feet high. But when the year 

 1906 closed, and its doings were figured out by the statisticians, it 

 was found that the lead mines of the world had turned out in that 

 twelve months nearly three times as much as they had in 1885. To 

 be accurate, the crop amounted to 1,061,533 tons. This mass of metal 

 would make a pyramid with a base one hundred and fifty feet square, 

 and rising nine hundred feet into the air. An increase of 300 per 

 cent, in twenty years indicates an enormous growth in the demand 

 for paint and putty, to say nothing of the consumption in the way of 

 ammunition and piping. 



Mercury 



Mercury is the one degenerate in the family of the metals. Be- 

 tween 1850 and 1860 it was tremendously in demand by the miners 



