CONSERVATION AND REPLENISHMENT. 191 



Dean and elsewhere, mines of iron ore were being exploited 

 with more and more energy. For the smelting of the ore 

 fuel was at hand, and trees were recklessly felled for the 

 work. Coal had been found, but coal fires were not found 

 appropriate to the purpose, and the consequent destruc- 

 tion of the woods, threatened to bring the country into a 

 condition not unlike what is now the case in many dis- 

 tricts of the Ural mountains in Russia what were richly 

 wooded lands being devastated. The immediate effect of 

 this was to quicken efforts to adapt coal fires to the smelt- 

 ing of ore, and the ulterior effect was to relieve the forests, 

 in some measure, of the demand thus made upon them. 



Walter White, in his volume entitled Ail Hound the 

 Wrecken, writes : 



" About the time that the Spanish Armada was defeated, 

 a great outcry and lamentation arose because of the waste 

 and decay of woods ami forests, and that having no timber 

 wherewith to build ships, the utter ruin of England must 

 speedily ensue. Many a man grieved in his old age over 

 the disappearance of woods where he had taken birds' nests 

 when a boy ; and the proprietors of salt pans in Worces- 

 tershire, and iron-smelters everywhere, whose ' voracious 

 works ' devoured enormous quantities of wood and char- 

 coal, were .afterwards accused as enemies of their country. 

 But the demand for fuel increased, and to avert the evil 

 consequences* ingenious patriots made experiment after 

 experiment to discover a way of smelting iron with pit- 

 coal or sea-coal, as it was then called, and what they pro- 

 posed may be read in the archives of the Patent Office. 

 Simon Sturtevant, writing his specification in 1612, 

 renews the lamentation over the destruction of timber 

 by the four hundred furnaces, Milnes, then at work in 

 Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, to say nothing of the nnmber 

 in other parts of the kingdom ; and describes his method 

 for using pit-coal, and thereby saving the woods, and 

 320,000 a-year. He failed, but other schemers were 

 ready to take his place, and among those who followed we 

 find Dud Dudley taking out a patent for the same object, 



