372 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



It is true that the vast barysphere within the earth is 

 composed chiefly or largely of oxide of iron ; that mass, how- 

 ever, is separated from the surface by so thick a layer of rock 

 that the material is quite beyond our reach; whilst the accessible 

 igneous rocks rich in iron contain constitutents which render 

 the material either useless as ore or so refractory, that if it 

 had to be utilised the exhaustion of the world's coal supply 

 would be seriously hastened, 



Mr. Andrew Carnegie in his Rectorial Address to the 

 University of St. Andrews in 1902 declared that the British 

 iron ores were nearly exhausted, as the Cumberland supply 

 was almost finished and the mines at Cleveland, except two, 

 would last only for another twenty to twenty-five years. 

 The British ironmaster has been warned repeatedly that the 

 rich Spanish oxides which are used so largely in our blast 

 furnaces will soon give place, as they are followed downward, 

 to poor carbonates ; and the American steel-magnate has been 

 assured that the Lake Superior ore, on which the great iron 

 and steel industry of the United States was founded, will be 

 exhausted a few years hence. In answer to various jeremiads 

 numerous estimates have been made in recent years of the 

 quantities of ore actually available. Much information was 

 collected by the British Consular authorities in a report edited 

 by Sir Llewellyn Smith and published by the Board of Trade 

 in 1905 ; but as these accounts came from men who had no 

 special knowledge of the subject, they were irregular and 

 incomplete. Recognising that the supplies of Scandinavian 

 ore were becoming of increasing importance to the British iron 

 industry, I invited Professor Sjogren to read a paper at the 

 Leicester meeting of the British Association upon the iron-ore 

 reserves of Scandinavia. He kindly undertook this task and 

 visited several of the more important areas to bring the informa- 

 tion up to date ; his valuable report was published in full by 

 the Association.^ Tornebohm had previously prepared an 

 estimate of the iron-ore supplies throughout the world but the 

 information available was so limited and unsatisfactory that 

 his optimistic estimates were unconvincing. Professor Sjogren, 

 realising the importance of more reliable and comprehensive 

 data, proposed that the International Geological Congress 



• Hj, Sjogren, "The Iron-Ore of the Scandinavian Peninsula," Rep. Brit. 

 Assoc. 1907, pp. 332-45. 



