﻿IRON MINES. 



Iron Mines. 



207 



IRON is by far the most useful of all metals with which we are 

 acquainted. Perhaps I might properly say, also, the most valuable, 

 for how indispensable we find it in almost every kind of labor. Gold 

 and diamonds are very scarce ; and, being very beautiful ornaments 

 to the person, they are consequently purchased only at high prices; 

 but of what real use are they ? Diamonds will cut glass, and the 

 diamond powder is useful to polish with ; gold forms a good cur- 

 rency, and is used in some other unimportant ways, and this is all 

 the real value there is to them. But iron, which is found in great 

 abundance in almost all countries, is far more valuable than both 

 together. Look around you and find a single article in or about the 

 manufacture of which iron was not used. Imagine, if you can, how 

 we should manage to get along without iron. Where there is no 

 iron, there could be no tools ; no arts could be carried on success- 

 fully without it, nor could the sciences exist or the cultivation of the 

 mind. In fact, the use of iron is the first step towards civilization. 

 Where it is unknown, the people are savages, and so they must re- 

 main. The rusty brown stones which constitute the ore of iron do 

 not seem to promise much of value, either as to beauty or usefulness. 

 But the ingenuity of man has found out the means of making them 

 of great importance, by drawing iron from them, and again refining 

 that into steel. 



There are various modes of obtaining the ore from iron, practised 

 in different countries, though in general it is the same. In England, 

 the brown stones containing the iron are roasted, which brings them 

 into a state which renders their fusion a much easier and more certain 

 operation, by expelling the sulphur or the arsenic which abounds in 

 them in their mineral state. The ore is then brought to the smelting 

 furnace, a huge oven, shaped somewhat like a cone, into which the 

 workmen throw in, alternately, baskets of coal and baskets of ore. 

 The coal is then ignited, and in the space of about two hours the 

 melted metal begins to settle to the bottom. It is then .et out into 

 channels formed in the sand, which lead it into hollows formed also 

 in sand, and here it settles and cools. It is then called pig iron. 



Great quantities of iron are annually brought from Russia. The 



