No. 1.] GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA. 81 



it is said, made, more than twenty-five years since, to collect it 

 and smelt it with an admixture of bog ore, which was then 

 treated in a blast-furnace, at Normandale, Norfolk county, Ontario. 

 These black sands are likewise met with at various points along 

 the coast of the United States, particularly on the shores of Con- 

 necticut, where they early attracted the attention of the colonists, 

 and were successfully worked more than a century since. The 

 following details relating to the history of these early and little- 

 known trials, are so interesting that I may be pardoned for intro- 

 ducing them here. It appears by a letter from Mr. Home, a 

 steel-maker and cutler of London, addressed to Mr. John EUicot, 

 F.R.S., and read before the Royal Society of Loudon, March 3, 

 1763, that, at that time, the Society for the Encouragement of 

 Arts and Manufactures was occupied with the question of the 

 Virginian black sand, as it was called. Already, before 1742, 

 one Dr. Moulen, of the Royal Society, had made some unsuccess- 

 ful experiments to determine the nature of this magnetic sand, 

 but in that year Mr. Home, having procured a quantity of it, 

 succeeded, as he tells us, in extracting from it more than one-half 

 of its weio-ht of fine malleable iron. He seems, however, to have 

 published nothing upon the subject until after Mr. Jared Elliot 

 had made known, twenty years later, by a pamphlet and a letter 

 addressed to the Society of Arts, and subsequently by a letter in 

 reply to Mr. Home's inquiries, that he was then making malleable 

 iron from the black sands, in blooms of fifty pounds and upwards, 

 by direct treatment in a common bloomary fire, a process which 

 seems, from his letters, to have been one familiar to him. He 

 describes the ore as yielding 60 per cent, of malleable iron, and 

 as being very abundant, and so free from impurity as to require 

 the addition of cinder or of bog ore. This manufticture of iron 

 from the sand had evidently been somewhat developed, for, ac- 

 cording to Mr. Elliot, his son had already erected a steel furnace, 

 before the Act of Parliament was passed prohibiting the manu- 

 facture of steel in the colonies. Specimens of the steel there pro- 

 duced were examined by Mr, Home, and found to be of excellent 

 quality, very tough, and not at all red-short.^ 



* These curious details are extracted from a rare volume entitled 

 Essays concerning Iron and Steel, (the first of the three essaj'S being on 

 " The American Sand-Iron,") by Henry Home, London, 1773. 12mo. , 

 pp. 223. A copy of this scarce book is in the possession of W. M. B. 

 Hartley, Esq., of New York. 



Vol. VI. F No. 1. 



