192 THE FORESTS OF ENGLAND. 



and persevering in experiments. Speaking of himself in 



his statement he says : ' Having former knowledge and 

 delight in Iron-works of my father's when I was but a 

 youth, afterward at twenty years old, was I fetched from 

 Oxford, then of Baliol Colledge, anno 1G19, to look and 

 manage 3 Iron Works of my father.' But wood arid char- 

 coal failing, he experimented with pit-coal, and reports 

 then : ' I found such success at first tryal as animated me, 

 for at my tryal or blast I made iron to profit with pit-coal, 

 and found, paetre est addere Inventioni.' " 



He laments the waste of small coal, which was then left 

 in the mine as worthless, and computes the consequent 

 loss of fuel as fit for the furnace at four thousand tons 

 a-year, within ten miles of Dudley Castle. " If all the 

 coles and ironstones," he argues, " so abounding, were 

 made right use of, we need not want iron as we do ; for 

 very many measures of ironstone are placed together under 

 the great ten yards thickness of coal, and upon another 

 thickness of coal two yards thick, as if God had decreed 

 the time when and how these Smith's should be supplyed, 

 and thus stand also with iron." 



We may smile when we find this much persecuted 

 inventor declaring that to make one ton of iron in twenty- 

 four hours would be sufficient ! " We need not a greater 

 quantity," he says. " With that quantity there would be 

 no lack of work for the smithy, and nailers in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Dudley, where trade was so bad that many 

 of them were ready to starve or steal." What would a 

 ton a-day do now ? 



In connection with this reference to the importance 

 attached to the general use of coal instead of wood for fuel, 

 it may be interesting to some to learn that on the same 

 authority, some five-and-twenty or thirty years since, when 

 in the neighbourhood of the pottery village of Swedlecut 

 or Swadlecote, the diggers began the " getting " of one of the 

 uppermost clay-beds the usual overlying seam of coal was 

 found to be amissing, to the surprise of all in the locality, 



