NICKEL AND ITS USES. 257 



interest in industrial circles, as it was thought cheap nickel was 

 thereby assured. Of late, however, the center of interest has moved 

 from nickel silicate and New Caledonia to nickelif erous pyrrhotite 

 and to the Sudbury District in the Canadian province of Ontario. 

 The interest attaching to this district is due, not to the discovery 

 of a new mineral or of nickel in a new association, if we except the 

 occurrence of small quantities of platinum arsenide in the Sud- 

 bury ore ; it is due to the richness of the ore and to the vast ex- 

 tent of the deposits. 



Attention was first attracted to these by reason of the consid- 

 erable masses of rich copper pyrite found close to the surface, and 

 it was as a region of copper ore that Sudbury first became famous. 

 At the depth of a few feet, however, the rich copper ores were 

 found to be underlaid by pyrrhotite, which occurs in large lens- 

 shaped deposits in an extensive belt of diorite. Scattered through 

 the pyrrhotite is copper pyrite in threads, in mere specks, and in 

 masses from the size of a pea to pockets containing several tons. 

 The nickel contents of this pyrrhotite vary considerably. Scarcely 

 any of it is entirely free from nickel, but the percentage varies 

 from a trace to as much as eight or nine per cent. 



An idea of the average value of the ore, and of the amount of 

 nickel the district is capable of affording, may be gained from the 

 particulars of the smelting operations of one of the companies that 

 are working in this district to the end of December, 1889. One 

 furnace ran 259 days and produced 3,849 tons of matte, said to 

 average thirteen per cent of nickel and eighteen per cent of cop- 

 per. A second furnace in 73 days produced 1,210 tons of matte of 

 equal richness. In other words, 41,000 tons of ore produced matte 

 containing 650 tons of nickel, and which was associated with 910 

 tons of copper, thus showing that the ore smelted averaged about 

 one and a half per cent of nickel together with two and a quarter 

 per cent of copper. All the nickel produced in this district finds 

 a ready market, being used principally in the manufacture of 

 guns and armor plate. It thus appears that the discoveries of the 

 extensive Canadian deposits of nickel, and of the valuable quali- 

 ties of nickel steel, are complementary one to the other. 



Pkof. Max Muller, in his address before the International Congress of Orien- 

 talists, expressed his objections to the word " prehistoric " as a vague term, that 

 almost withdraws itself from definition. " If real history," he said, " begins only 

 with the events of which we possess contemporaneous witnesses, then, no doubt, 

 the whole period of which we are now speaking, and many later periods also, 

 would have to be called prehistoric. But if history means, as it did originally, 

 research, and knowledge of real events based on such research, then the events of 

 which we are going to speak are as real and as truly historical as the battle of 

 "Waterloo." 



VOL. XLII. — 17 



