1866. | The New Ivon-fields of England. 325 
the less honourable use of mending roads, without their metalli- 
ferous qualities having been discovered. 
I may here be allowed to capitulate very briefly the progress of 
the iron-smelting of this country to the present time. The sources 
from which our chief supply of iron had been procured from very 
early periods down to the middle of the last century were the 
heematites of Gloucestershire, South Wales, the Mendip Hills, and 
the iron-stones of Kent and the Weald of Sussex ; the coal-measures 
of Salop, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Scotland. Some of these ores 
are believed on good grounds to have been worked by the Romans, 
the fuel generally, but perhaps not exclusively, used in the process 
of smelting being charcoal. This material, however, became gra- 
dually scarce, and some of the writers of the last century lament 
the rapid destruction of the forests both of the South of England 
and the Midland counties, owing to the using up of the trees.* 
Necessity is the mother of invention, and as the requirements of 
iron became more extended, and the supply of charcoal diminished, 
it became necessary to try some other fuel. ‘There is, as is 
common in such cases, some uncertainty to whom the honour belongs 
of having first successfully employed coal for this purpose, but it is 
generally admitted that Dud Dudley, after several failures, was the 
first to succeed in the attempt. The wasteful consumption of this 
valuable mineral in the process of smelting was at first enormous, but 
as the process began to be more generally adopted, as improvements 
took place in the formation of the furnaces, the use of the hot blast 
and other appliances were introduced, the proportion of coal em- 
ployed became gradually less, down to the present day, when it may 
be said to have nearly reached its minimum. 
The black-band and clay-band iron-stones of the coal-measures 
have hitherto been our chief sources of supply. These ores occur 
in thin layers associated with coal-seams, shales, clays, and sand- 
stones. A few years since, however, the rich hematites of North 
Lancashire and West Cumberland were opened up, and are now 
very largely used, both for mixing with the former and for the 
manufacture of the finest pig-iron directly from the ores themselves. 
From this iron only Bessemer steel is at present made. The ore occurs 
in enormous “ pockets,” or irregular masses, filling chambers in the 
carboniferous limestone, and often only covered by a few feet of 
drift clay or millstone grit, while in one or two places it is quarried 
im open-work. Meanwhile, the process of exhaustion of the coal- 
measure iron-stones in some of the principal centres of manufacture 
was going on apace, and it must be confessed that now the local 
resources of Staffordshire, Shropshire (Coalbrook Dale), and the 
* Tam informed by Mr. W. Brockbank that there are still two or three places 
in Great Britain where charcoal is used in smelting under peculiar circumstances, 
and for the production of a very high class of pig-iron. 
