2?,6 



NATURE 



[November 22, 1917 



where Mesozoic sediments rest upon the ancient schists 

 and gneisses, and are ready for exploitation when 

 railway facilities are provided. In Tunis the ores 

 worked are often manganiferous, and some of them, 

 though apparently true haematites, carry more than 

 a trace of phosphorus. 



Haematite masses 

 formerly worked on the 

 island of Elba and on 

 various of the Grecian 

 islands in the yEgean 

 Sea are either exhausted 

 or likely to become ex- 

 hausted', if quarried at 

 the pre-war rate, within 

 the present generation. 



Produce from t h e 

 Minette orefield of Lor- 

 raine has generally been 

 converted into metal in 

 Germany, Belgium, or 

 France before it reached 

 Britain, and, in conse- 

 quence, the great im- 

 portance of this orefield 

 as a source of supply to 

 British markets is often 

 overlooked. It would 

 appear that certainly far 

 more than a million tons 

 of metal brought into 

 this country in each of 

 several of the pre-war 

 vears might be traced 

 back to a source of 

 origin in the bedded 

 Jurassic sediments of 

 Lorraine. For the 

 smelting of each ton of 

 this imported metal, 

 probably at least three 

 tons of ore and two tons 

 of coal (from the Her- 

 c\ nian belt of coalfields) 

 must have been con- 

 sumed, and it therefore 

 appears that for quantity 

 of mineral mined to sup- 

 ply the British market 

 the area taken from 

 France by Germany 

 since 1870 must have 

 held a place equal to, if 

 not in front of, the iron- 

 fields of Spain. The 

 iron ore wrought in 

 Lorraine occurs as a 

 series of beds, inter- 

 stratified among Alle- 

 nian (Toarcian) shales 

 and limestones, almost 

 identical in age with the 

 Northamptonshire iron 

 ores. The outcrop of 

 the Minette formation 

 extends from the 

 southernmost tip of Bel- 

 ig i u m through the 



borders of Luxembourg with France and German Lor- 

 raine, southwards at an average distance of about 

 three miles inside the 19 14 German border as far as 

 Metz, and crosses into France just east of Nancy. 



Of the workable orefield about 160 square miles 

 lie on the German side of the border, fourteen square 



NO. 2508, VOL. 100] 



miles in Luxembourg, and 208 square miles on the 

 French side. The " Grey Bed " ores from French 

 Lorraine are almost perfectly self-fluxing in the blast- 

 furnace, and yield a pig-iron particularly suitable for 

 steel-making by the basic process. According to Ger- 



V .-;£ ,* % } 



-Sketch Map— ' * 



_OF — THE— ^^^ Outcrop or Ironstone Formation 



Minette ORE-ntiLD or Lorraine:- R,oyLo workable extent ofthegrey bed 



— AFTER VILLAIN. — _i2ff_ Contours Heights txPRCSsfO in Metrls 



a I J owl ABOVE aCA LEVEL. 



_♦-♦_ Frontiers. As in VW'f, 



.2 2 ± /' 



man authorities, quite the best of the ore comes from 

 the deeper mines beneath the Briey plateau, and had 

 not the German ironmasters been bound by agreement 

 to continue the payment of royalties to the owners of 

 minerals in Germain Lorraine and Luxembourg, they 

 would have abandoned these workings in their own 



