50 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



railway stations could be provided of equal strength to the present 

 and with less consumption of materials. The invention is one of 

 that character with respect to which there can be no mistake, and 

 any person who sees may judge for himself of the properties of 

 the cement, and we shall be greatly mistaken if some of our large 

 contractors do not very shortly seek to test the practical value of 

 this remarkable "iron cement." 



On previous occasions we have described the remarkable pre- 

 servative qualities of the zepipe composition on stone and brick, 

 and the extraordinary effects which the application of one part of 

 the process has upon paper, converting it into a substance harder 

 and more enduring than oak, and capable of being substituted for 

 metals in many of the uses to which they are applied in the arts 

 and manufactures. Following out the line of investigation into 

 the chemical constituents of the substances which he employs, he 

 has now succeeded in producing some results, which, if they had 

 not been shown under our inspection, we should have hesitated to 

 believe possible. By combining various substances, which may be 

 readily obtained in large quantities, and at almost nominal prices, 

 the inventor has made what lie calls this " iron cement ; " and truly 

 it is an iron cement. It is a cement which, easily applied, be- 

 comes in a few minutes as hard as iron, and, so far as we are 

 aware, this is a quality which is not possessed by any other sub- 

 stance, that of complete and perfect cohesion to iron. At Bat- 

 tersea we saw two large plates of iron held together so firmly as 

 to defy all attempts at separating them. The plates had in sev- 

 eral parts been fractured by the attempt to separate the two sur- 

 faces, but they still remained firm and immovable. Two plates 

 of iron were cemented together in such a manner that the lower 

 one could have suspended to it the weight of several tons ; the 

 projecting corners of the lower plate to which the weights were 

 attached were bent and curved, and the upper and lower plates 

 had " buckled," but they still remained held together by the thin 

 layer of iron cement as though they were but one plate. By the 

 side of this a plate has been made up of alternate thin sheets 

 of iron and planks of timber, and the wood and the iron ad- 

 hered as firmly as in the case when iron surfaces only were ex- 

 posed to the action of the cement. A third test consisted of thin 

 sheets of iron with alternate layers of paper, which had been pre- 

 viously coated with another kind of composition of Col. Sceze- 

 relmey's. There the same wonderful cohesion existed. A sheet 

 of glass was fixed to the edge of an iron bar by this extraordinary 

 cement, and was as firmly held as the iron or wood or prepared 

 paper of the previous experiments with iron and wood. 



CAUSE AND PREVENTION OF DECAY IN STONE. 



At the 1867 meeting of the British Association, Mr. John Spiller 

 stated his conclusion, from a long series of experiments and ob- 

 servations, that the corrosive action of sulphurous and sulphuric 

 acids in the atmosphere, resulting from the combustion of coal as 

 fuel, operates, in large towns especially, in a destructive manner 



