210 IRON 



IRON. 



Gold is for the mistress silver for the maid, 

 Copper for the craftsman, cunning at his trade. 

 ' Good ! ' said the Baron, sitting in his hall, 

 ' But Iron Cold Iron is the master of them all.' 



RUDYARD KIPLING. 



Although iron is so valuable and so widely diffused (there 

 is scarcely a country in which it is not found), it was not one 

 of the first metals employed in the service of man. One of the 

 reasons for this is that it is scarcely ever found pure, but 

 always mixed with some other substance forming what are 

 called iron ores. These ores are very different in appearance 

 from iron, and it was long before men discovered that it was 

 possible to extract iron from them, and even after the 

 discovery, the process was always slow and difficult. 



The chief iron ores are : 



1. Magnetic Iron Ore, or black oxide of iron. This is 

 a mixture of iron and oxygen, and contains more iron than 

 any other of the iron ores. 



2. Haematite (Greek haimatites, blood-like). There are two 

 varieties of this ore, one called Red Haematite, the other 

 Brown Haematite. They are compounds of iron and oxygen, 

 but both contain a little more oxygen than the magnetic ore, 

 and mixed with the brown haematite is a certain amount of 

 water. 



3. Carbonate of Iron is a compound of iron and carbon and 

 oxygen. An impure form of this, mixed with clay, is called 

 clay-band ironstone, and another containing, besides clay, 

 a considerable proportion of coaly or bituminous matter, is 

 called blackband ironstone. 



When the ores have been dug up out of the ground, the next 

 step is to separate the iron from the other substances with 

 which it is combined. The ores themselves, however, are 

 rarely pure, and pure iron (which is white in colour) is never 

 obtained except in a chemical laboratory. Carbon when 

 heated joins very readily with oxygen, and the easiest way of 



