128 president's address — section b. 



present day as completely as the limits permitted, and have dwelt 

 more fully on the particular phases of pneumatic treatment which 

 more strictly embody the essential features of the general conception. 

 Historically it is clear that the materialisation of the latter has found 

 its most adequate industrial expression for mattes in that modification 

 of Bessemer's magnificent invention which was first investigated on 

 a working scale, at the suggestion of Semennikow, by von Jossa and 

 Laletin, in 1867-8, and which was subsequently perfected into a per- 

 manent success by the efforts of Manhes and David. For ores, the 

 kernel of its success already lies in Hollway's process of 1878, but has 

 been brought to a workable pitch of perfection in its more modern 

 derivatives. 



Metallurgically speaking, the pneumatic treatment is not likely to 

 be supplanted by anything better for a very considerable time. It 

 reaches down to and utilises basic forces of nature with just that 

 spontaneous unhampered licence which is characteristic of those 

 forces themselves, when, obedient only to inherent self-restrictions, 

 they mutually strive for states of equilibrium. 



It is thus safe to say that, in general principle, the modern copper- 

 converting operation and its metallurgical confrere, pyrite-smelting, 

 have come to stay. Their extension has been remarkable. Slow of 

 growth at first they are now, where the circumstances at all warrant 

 it, as naturally the first thought of the metallurgist as the notion of 

 smelting itself. Both are alike conditioned by the sulphide nature 

 of the prevailing ores of copper, and considerations of metallurgical 

 convenience and husbandry will continue to enforce the preliminary 

 enrichment of those ores into a matte. However, just as in the science 

 of mathematics there are clever, intellectually artistic, as well as 

 ploddingly roundabout ways of solving the same problem, so also the 

 pneumatic copper processes must be pronounced to be the ''most elegant 

 solution " possible of the problem of liberating the metal out of the 

 bonds of the strongest, closest chemical affinity which it is subject to. 

 There is but one force in the service of man at the present time which, 

 in disruptive power, surpasses those enlisted in the pneumatic processes. 

 Yet, until electricity shall be obtained from the skies at a merely nominal 

 cost, it may safely be predicted that it will not completely supplant 

 the rapid oxidation methods in the treatment of copper sulphides. 

 The pyro-metallurgical processes offer such advantages in point of 

 capacity and economy that the direct electro-metallurgical treatment 

 of the ordinary poverty-stricken ores will not replace them. But 

 even in the case of mattes, on the whole, it will remain less costly, 

 more convenient, and not more wasteful of metal to create the energy 

 required for their decomposition out of inherent combustible con- 

 stituents which fully serve the purpose and lie at hand free of cost, 

 than to apply electric forces. For some time to come the latter will 

 be derivable only from other natural, but dearer fuels, or from natural 

 powers, like water, and even the most sanguine regard for the science 

 of mechanics cannot guarantee any early radical improvement in the 

 present unsatisfactor}^ economic state of that science, where transfor- 

 mations of energy are concerned. In addition, the liberation of the 



