40 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tonnage of 1865. This enormous output was made in eighty-five 

 " converters " owned by forty steel-works, which were distributed 

 in eight States, viz., Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, 

 West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Colorado. 



In 1772 the American manufacturers' price for steel was equal 

 to $180.60 per gross ton. Steel of better quality can be purchased 

 of the American manufacturer of to-day for thirty dollars per 

 gross ton, a decline of eighty-four per cent in one hundred and 



nineteen years. 



Twenty-seven years have elapsed since the first Bessemer steel 

 was made in America, and that time, improved by the labors of 

 skillful men from among our engineers, metallurgists, and chem- 

 ists, has wrought wondrous changes in the construction and man- 

 agement of our furnaces, steel-works, and rolling-mills. To-day 

 the tendency of all metallurgical manufacturing enterprises is 

 toward concentration, not only in commercial and administrative 

 afeairs, but in their machinery as well. Giant engines, ponderous 

 roll-trains, colossal hammers, crushing forging-presses, stalwart 

 cranes, furnaces whose "fervent heat" destroys all doubt of the 

 possibility of the fusion of worlds, ore piles rivaling mountams 

 in magnitude; enormous stores of coal, suggesting yet more 

 enormous mines ; a vast entanglement of railways to all parts of 

 the works ; a water-supply sufficient for a town ; miles of subter- 

 ranean pipes bringing gaseous fuel to the roaring mills— are but 

 the common details of a modern establishment for the manufact- 

 ure of steel. Practices once condemned as criminal extravagances 

 are now regarded as essential economies ; things once deemed im- 

 possible by men of little faith are but the familiar occurrences of 

 to-day. Buildings, machinery, methods, have all been touched 

 by the spirit of progress. Science has become better acquainted 

 with art, and art has a better appreciation of science, and their 

 united forces are marching forever forward. Before their steady 

 advance difficulties vanish, obstacles are surmounted, and seem- 

 ing impossibilities are overcome ; sound principles are established 

 in place of empiricisms, and educated skill replaces laborious ig- 

 norance. Verily, " old things are passing away and all things are 

 become new." 



Eyidence is given in the Rev. Thomas Parkinson's Yorkshire Legends and 

 Traditions of the survival of the belief in fairies to a late date. An old man told 

 the author a few years ago that his father, when young, had seen a dance of fames, 

 and that they were " of nearly all colors." A similar statement has been made to 

 Mr Parkinson's reviewer in the Athenaeum, who suggests that such visions may 

 be misinterpreted facts, not mere mental illusions. The birds called ruflPs dance 

 in the moonlight much after the fashion of the round dances of yore, and some 

 of these dances may have been mistaken for those of fairies. 



