November 9, 1893] 



NA TURE 



27 



that first made a particular discovery is often a difficult 

 question to settle ; it is, after all, perhaps a matter of ac- 

 cident, or shall we say rather a matter of gift. But the man 

 who follows his guiding star, and is led by it to honour, 

 and success, and fortune, is one whose example others 

 may well follow, even though it may not lead those others 

 there. A great work or a very little work has to be done ; 

 set to work and do it. There is your guiding star shining 

 clear and bright ; follow it. There may be bright scintil- 

 lations to the right and left ; they may be merely igncs 

 faint, or they may be other men's guiding stars ; they 

 have nothing to do with you. You may have to work 

 hard, but any way try to work wisely ! 



IRON ORES. 



The Iro7t Ores of Great Britain and Ireland. By 

 J, D. Kendall, F.G.S. With numerous illustrations. 

 (London : Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1893.) 



ALTHOUGH numerous works relating to mineral 

 deposits of particular districts have appeared at 

 different times, besides larger treatises dealing with the 

 subject generally, such as the late John Arthur Phillips' 

 •• Ore Deposits," the want of a systematic account of our 

 present knowledge of the origin and occurrence of British 

 iron ores, and of the means of working these ores, has 

 long been noticed. This want will.be supplied by the 

 volume under consideration. The author is a mining 

 engineer of thirty years' experience, and he has been 

 able to supplement a careful study of the available litera- 

 ture by unpublished information derived from his own 

 observations. The result is a volume that will prove of 

 substantial value as a work of reference to all interested 

 in the iron industry of this country, more especially as 

 the published information can only be found by a la- 

 borious search through the volumes of the Journal of the 

 Iron and Steel Institute, and of the Transactions of other 

 societies, 



Mr. Kendall has broken up his volume, ^ which 

 covers 430 pages, into four parts. In the first, he gives 

 some interesting information regarding the early working 

 of iron ores, of which there is indirect evidence in nearly 

 all the valleys of the Lake district. The presence of 

 Roman coins, some of them as early as Trajan, found in 

 heaps of iron cinder in Sussex and near Monmouth, 

 proves that iron was made at a very early period from 

 the red and brown oxides. Indeed, it is possible that 

 these beds were worked at an even earlier period, for 

 flint flakes and rough unturned pottery were found by 

 Boyd Dawkins on the surface of a slag heap near Battle. 

 In the second part, the author discusses the geological 

 position and mineralogical characteristics of iron ore 

 deposits. The third section deals with the age and origin 

 of the deposits, and the last describes the method of 

 searching for and working iron ores, with useful in- 

 formation on working costs, selling prices, and conditions 

 of leases. 



The author's task is not a light one. Within the limits 

 of 430 pages to describe even the main features of the 

 long list of mines which give the United Kingdom 

 (1891) its 12,777,689 tons of iron ore, valued at ;^3,355,86o 

 at the pit's mouth, is by no means easy. With the aid of 

 NO. 1254, VOL. 49] 



forty-one illustrations and five folding plates, he has, 

 however, been enabled to compress a large amount of 

 information within a comparatively small compass, the 

 value of the descriptions being increased by the insertion 

 of bibliographies for each district. 



As would naturally be expected, all the ores noticed in 

 the volume are not treated with equal fulness, preference 

 having been given to those of the greatest commercial 

 or scientific importance. It is to be regretted that the 

 great lode of Perran, near Truro, should have been dis- 

 missed in a single line. The late Sir Warington Smyth 

 made many attempts to introduce this curious deposit to 

 the notice of ironmasters, and it has formed the subject 

 of numerous important memoirs. The most interesting 

 descriptions given by Mr. Kendall are perhaps those re- 

 lating to the district with which he is specially acquainted 

 — the hematite district of West Cumberland and Fur- 

 ness, a district which has received less attention from 

 geologists than any other of equal importance in the 

 British Isles. The ores are of special value for the part 

 which they play in admixture with the poorer qualities of 

 ironstone, as well as for the production of Bessemer pig- 

 iron. So irregular, however, are these deposits that the 

 boring-tool may easily pass within a few inches of amass 

 worth thousands of pounds without discovering a trace 

 of it. There can be no doubt that the acquirement of 

 an accurate practical knowledge of these irregular de- 

 posits, of which the surface tells no tale, is the most 

 difficult subject with which the mining engineer has to 

 deal, and yet in many cases the difficulty is entirely 

 ignored, with the result that the cost of exploration is 

 enormously increased. 



The chapter on the ironstones of the carboniferous 

 rocks contains little that is new, the bulk of the informa- 

 tion being contained in the " Memoirs of the Geological 

 Survey." The analyses given relate to the iron ores 

 collected by S. H. Blackwell, and the author might with 

 advantage have mentioned the fact. The formation of 

 this collection marked an epoch in the history of metal- 

 lurgy, for, notwithstanding the magnitude of the interests 

 involved in the iron and steel industries, no systematic 

 collection representing the workable ores of the kingdom 

 had been made until the Great Exhibition of 1851. The 

 want was then supplied by the liberal exertions of Mr, 

 S. H, Blackwell, a Dudley ironmaster, who, after the ex- 

 hibition, presented this extensive and interesting series to 

 the Museum of Practical Geology, munificently placing a 

 sum of £soo at the disposal of Dr. Percy towards defray- 

 ing the cost of their analysis. The results were subse- 

 quently published at Government expense in the 

 " Memoirs of the Geological Survey." 



The perplexing and fascinating subject of the genesis 

 of iron ore deposits is treated by the author with great 

 fulness, and his conclusions deserve attentive considera- 

 tion. He brings forward a large amount of evidence 

 in support of the views propounded by Sorby and by 

 Huddleston that the ores of Cleveland and Northamp- 

 tonshire were produced by the replacement of an ordinary 

 limestone, and extends the theory to all deposits 

 occurring in the secondary rocks. The source of the iron, 

 he believes, may have been in the clays, with which all 

 these deposits are closely connected. In the case of 

 the red heematites, he is of opinion that the most likely 



