60 president's address — SECTION B. 



of mind in this connection still prevail. Thus the more marked inflam- 

 mability of sulphur in its elemental state, which held the scientific 

 imagination in bondage for centuries, appears to be responsible for a 

 curious traditional trait which still characterises some of the current 

 metallurgical thinking of the present day. It is much more common 

 than it should be to attribute the generation of heat in the pneumatic 

 processes here dealt with, either solely or chiefly, to the sulphur con- 

 tained in the mattes and ores treated, and to overlook the iron, zinc, 

 lead, &c. This remark applies even to standard authors, and presents 

 a curious instance of the survival of alchemical notions — holding their 

 own notwithstanding modern training. The intentional combustion 

 of a metal, perhaps, excites a latent feeling of waste, while that of the 

 metalloid appeals as advantageous, or else the burning of the former 

 is valued only as a curious, practically useless, fact, the appreciation 

 of which does not transcend the province of laboratory experiments. 

 When Ingen Housz, about 1780, first showed his philosophical friends 

 the intense brilliancy of the light manifested by the combustion of a 

 steel watch-spring in an atmosphere of oxygen, doubtless no more 

 importance was attached to this striking phenomenon as the forerunner 

 of everyday metallurgical operations, carried out on a huge scale, than 

 is even now applied in the case of phosphorus, the combustion of which 

 he also showed them. It is probably very much older knowledge that 

 a piece of iron, heated to a red heat and very rapidly whirled about 

 in a circle, will heat up higher and throw off sparks. But, until the 

 Bessemer steel process came into vogue, no special industrial impor- 

 tance can have been attached to this fact. Dr. Percy also mentions 

 an old practice of the nailmakers to maintain the heat in the nails 

 during forging by projecting a cold blast upon them ; the gulf between 

 this contradictory expedient and its correct chemical appreciation can, 

 however, only be bridged over by a quite modern scientific interest in 

 such phenomena. 



First Appreciation of Fuel Value of Sulphides and Growth of the 

 Idea. — -Before any truly scientific application or even interpretation 

 of the fuel values of metals could find its way into metallurgical circles, 

 it was necessary that the combustion theory of Lavoisier should be 

 firmly established in the field of theoretical metallurgy, and this was a 

 matter of slow growth. It is only of recent years that metallurgical 

 chemistry can be said to be walking side by side with general chemistry. 

 In the past it has always lagged behind, and has been slow to accept 

 new doctrines, as is customary with practitioners who are engrossed 

 in the purely operative aspects of their work. Nor could Lavoisier's 

 philosophy alone really confer practically telling benefits on metal- 

 lurgy before the equally important subject of stoichiometry had found 

 an entrance into those circles. Before BerzeHus finally (1818) co- 

 ordinated the reasonings of Richter, Berthollet, Dalton, and, sup- 

 plementing them by his own researches, offered his simple theory of 

 chemical proportions to the world, even the comparatively primitive . 

 reactions of metallurgy could not be reliably followed quantitatively, 

 and, speaking generally, the quantitative aspect of his labors is ever 



