

-S7A' WILLIAM .s'/AM/A'A'.S 1 , F.R.S. 



377 



while in a state of redness, and then plunged into water. With- 

 out going into the details of those experiments he would, with the 

 jxTiuission of the Meeting, hand them to the Secretary, in order 

 that they might appear in their "Transactions." He had the 

 misfortune, though he very highly esteemed Mr. Bell, and put 

 store upon his views, of often differing from him, but in this 

 instance he believed Mr. Bell had been perhaps too severe upon 

 him. He certainly took the view that if they wanted to make a 

 high-class steel, such as Mr. Adamson had brought before them, 

 they must exclude, from that material foreign substances, not only 

 phosphorus and sulphur, but also manganese. He knew from his 

 own experimental facts, and from long experience, that they could 

 not produce a very high-class material unless they made it exceed- 

 ingly pure ; and with all deference to Mr. Bell, he thought there 

 was a broad line of difference between carbon and manganese. 

 Carbon, they knew, associated itself with the iron, and for every 

 loth per cent, of carbon they got a definite increase of tensile 

 strength, therefore when they wanted tensile strength they put in 

 carbon, but that was not the case with manganese. They did not 

 put l per cent, of manganese into their rails in order that they 

 might resist the action of corrosion better, or in order that they 

 might stand the test better to which they were subjected, but it 

 was well known that they used that amount of manganese in order 

 that the stuff might roll better, and, as regards rails, he had not 

 much to say against it ; on the contrary, he looked upon the steel 

 which had latterly been brought forward so much by the Terre- 

 Noire Company as a feather in the cap of the open-hearth process, 

 and therefore he had no reason to find fault with it ; but he saw 

 great danger in the indiscriminate use of manganese for the pro- 

 duction of the higher classes of steel. When they heard such 

 extraordinary results as Mr. Kitson had alluded to, when they 

 heard from an authority like M. Fremy such results announced to 

 them as that, under certain circumstances, steel utterly failed, he 

 believed that if the case were to be examined chemically it would 

 be found that the steel was, as it were, forced into a condition of 

 mechanical aptitude for its purpose by the addition of silicon, 

 which was another of those substances which, he thought, under 

 the circumstances, ought to be strictly excluded from high-class 

 steel. Mr. Adamson had called iron a " concrete " of " slag " and 



