234 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



tiny the considerable quantities of these sands found on onr 

 Atlantic coast attracted the attention of the colonists and of scien- 

 tific men in England, and the Virginia sand-iron, as it was called, 

 was the subject of many experiments. The first successful 

 attempts at working it were, however, made in Killingworth, 

 Conn., where the Rev. Jabez Elliot, grandson of the celebrated 

 John Elliot, the apostle of the Indians, early turned his attention 

 to the abundant black sands of the coast, and succeeded in treat- 

 ing them in a forge fire similar to the German forge of the modern 

 American bloomary fire. It appears from his account laid before 

 the Royal Society of London, in 1761, that he was then making 

 iron blooms of 50 pounds 1 weight from this ore, and that his son had 

 already established a steel factory in Killingworth, when an act 

 of the British Parliament forbade the manufacture of steel in the 

 colonies. The London Society of Arts in 1761 awarded a medal 

 to Mr. Elliot for his discovery. The working, however, was 

 abandoned, and for a century no attempts were made in Amer- 

 ica to use these sands. Some -i years since the large quantities 

 of them in the lower St. Lawrence attracted attention, and 

 successful trials were made for their reduction in the bloomary 

 fires of Northern New York, after which an establishment for 

 working them was erected at Morsie, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 

 where, under the direction of skilled workmen from Lake Cham- 

 plain, the treatment of these iron sands has been successfully 

 carried on. These sand ores are remarkably free from both 

 sulphur and phosphorus, and hence yield an iron of great purity 

 and toughness. The working is effected in furnaces like those 

 used on Lake Champlain, and presents no difficulties. 



THE PHOSPHATE BEDS OF SOUTH CAROLINA. 



The following extract is from a paper read before the Boston 

 Society of Natural History, by Prof. N. S. Shaler : 



" The bed of phosphate of lime lies immediately on the top of 

 the ' marls of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, 1 as they have been 

 generally termed, though these beds are not limited to the basins 

 of these streams. The whole of the workable material lies in a 

 single bed, from 6 inches to 3 feet in thickness. Although it va- 

 ries in its chemical and fossil components, it retains everywhere 

 certain marked features. It is always more or less nodular ; the 

 nodules vary much in size, some being no larger than a pea, some 

 a foot or more in diameter. These nodules contain, generally, 

 one or more fragments of shells or corals, apparently all Eocene 

 species, which seem to have been the aggregating points of the 

 matter contained in the nodule. So far as my knowledge goes, 

 there have been few, if any, nodules found containing traces of 

 vertebrate remains. Many of the nodules show traces of wear- 

 ing, not exactly what would be expected from their being rolled 

 as by a stream, but the style of wear which comes from being 

 stamped and trodden on. The appearance of the worn surfaces 

 reminds me of that seen on fragments of bone from Big Boiie 



