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To give his audience some idea of the terrific heat necessary 

 to melt iron, Mr. Lewis had prepared a little table. The mere 

 figures, he said, would of themselves be unable to give any 

 adequate notion, but let his hearers take, as their starting point, 

 the heat of boiling water. Boiling water, though the heat of it 

 was sufficient to cause people to make " cursory remarks " if 

 they got a splash of it by accident, was a mere nothing 

 by comparison with the temperature of melting iron. Water 

 boils under ordinary circumstances at 212 deg. Fahrenheit. 

 At 594 deg., more than double that temperature, lead fuses. At 

 1,342 deg., more than double this again, iron is at " welding 

 heat," and may be hammered into shape. But even this great 

 heat must be again more than doubled before we get to 2,786 

 deg., the fusing heat of iron. By what mechanical contrivance 

 the earliest iron-casters of Sussex had obtained this enormous 

 temperature no one as yet knew. It had been suggested, in 

 regard to other ancient peoples who had known how to cast iron, 

 that the winds of heaven had been pressed into service to supply 

 the blast for the furnaces, but in view of the comparative modera- 

 tion and the uncertain direction of the winds in Sussex, Mr. Lewis 

 was inclined to doubt very much whether this could have been 

 done here. In fact, he did not seem very much to favour the 

 idea at all, for in India, where from ancient times iron had been 

 worked, and where there was a hot, steady wind for many months 

 together, the natives had told him that it was impossible to melt 

 iron, and when he had described the process to them, they had 

 merely looked upon him as an unusually talented liar. 



It was archeology alone which threw any light on their 

 subject. There was in the Museum at Hastings a little iron 

 statuette about six inches high, of the date of the Roman 

 occupation, which the best authorities agreed was cast iron. 

 Mr. Lewis showed a photograph of it, — a rusted, time-worn, 

 featureless little figure, with one leg missing. However, as he 

 remarked, " in these things you have to take what you can get." 

 Other Roman remains there were, such as coins and other 

 articles, which had been discovered in the remains of furnaces, 

 where there was no evidence of the presence of anything 

 medieval ; which pretty conclusively proved that the Romans 

 had found a way of melting iron and casting it in moulds. At 

 the remains of an ancient furnace at Beaufort Park a coin of 

 Hadrian had been found, while at Maresfield, coins, of dates 

 ranging from the reign of Nero to Diocletian, had been un- 

 earthed. A photograph was shown of another ancient working 

 at Hastings, the place round where the fires had roared long 

 years ago being now well-wooded and grown with weeds and 

 flowers. With the departure of the Romans for good, and the 

 advent of the Saxon, the iron industry in Sussex may have 



