NOTES BY THE EDITOR, 



ON T H K 



PROGRESS OF SCIENCE FOR THE YEAR 1868. 



During the year 1868 the civilized world seems to have been 

 in a state of extreme scientific tension, — discovery after discov- 

 ery, and invention after invention, following each other so closely, 

 that the chronicler of its progress is tempted to exclaim in the 

 words of another, " If knowledge be power, then indeed is man 

 getting powerful. To what is it all tending? What limit of 

 knowledge can man attain ? " The time was when the harvest of 

 discovery was reaped only centuries after the seeds were planted ; 

 now a man may live to see both seedtime and harvest, and the 

 poor inventor of to-day will be the millionnaire of to-morrow. 

 •' Wheatstone has lived to see the junction of two hemispheres by 

 an invention at whose birth he was present." 



This is emphatically the age of steel. Steel rails, steel boilers, 

 steel in machinery, steel in construction, are fast superseding iron 

 for the same purposes. The manufacture of steel is undoubtedly 

 to be the most important and extensive in the world ; and Ameri- 

 ca is, beyond all others, the country of good iron ore. We have 

 an inexhaustible supply of the best quality of iron ore, and an ap- 

 parently inexhaustible sujoply of fuel to work it with ; and are of 

 necessity interested in any improvements in the manufacture of 

 steel. 



Among the noteworthy improvements in the manufacture of 

 steel, to which the reader's attention is called in the present vol- 

 ume, are the i^rocesses of Bessemer, of Hargreaves and Heaton, 

 of Whelpley and Storer, and of Ellershausen, the furnaces of Sie- 

 mens and Wilson, and the use of pulverized fuel. In the Besse- 

 mer process, in which the metal is decarbonized by a blast of air 

 passed through it, the spectroscope has been successfully em- 



J^6 J/f 



