218 
NATURE 
[Fuly 20, 187% 

success in teaching physical science should enable them 
to enlarge the basis of the Institution, so as to include all 
the higher branches of a liberal education. 
We have, on more than one occasion, advocated the 
addition of a Biological chair to the four already agreed 
upon, for it has seemed to us an anomaly that a School 
of Physical, or, to use the correlative term, Natural 
Science, should be without teaching in general Natural 
History, especially in a locality in which excellent facili- 
ties exist, But there is another view which has been pro- 
minently in our mind. If the College were intended to be 
a mere mining and engineering school, established to 
enable engineers and coal-viewers to educate their pupils 
with less labour and cost, its claim upon the general 
public would be small. It is due to the public that Science 
for its own sake,—Science with less direct reference to 
considerations of pounds, shillings, and pence, should be 
recognised ; and in no way could this be so readily done, 
under existing circumstances, as by the establishment of a 
Chair in Biology. 
We readily admit the pre-eminent importance of the 
subjects selected to commence with, and as willingly record 
our confidence that the Executive Committee will ap- 
proach this as all other subjects with the single desire to 
do what is right. 
Finally, we would make one comment on the attitude 
of Durham University. For many years past it has been 
regarded as almost hopeless to expect any active assistance 
in educational matters from that hitherto somewhat sleepy 
body. But with the new Dean seems to commence a 
new 7égime, and facts appear to bear out the testimony of 
many of the speakers at Saturday’s meeting, that in all 
arrangements in connection with the new College, the 
University authorities have shown the widest liberality 
and unselfishness. 
The vast importance of schools of this sort, and the 
prospect of a movement witha similar object in the West 
Riding of Yorkshire, renders needless any apology for 
reviewing with some detail this last addition to our scien- 
tific institutions. 

PERCY’S METALLURGY OF LEAD 
The Metallurgy of Lead, including Desilverisation and 
Cupellation. By John Percy, M.D., F.R.S. (London : 
J. Murray, 1870.) 
HE preparation of metallic lead from its several ores, 

amongst which galena stands foremost, presents to | 
us processes and circumstances which, though generally 
simple, are amongst the most interesting and delicate in 
the whole range of productive metallurgy. It is therefore 
with even more expectation than attached to his former 
| 

“bird’s-eye” view of all the various forms of commer- 
cial metallurgy of lead (in humbler phrase of lead smelt- 
ing) will here find a classified survey of it as prac- 
tised in Great Britain, all over Europe, and in North 
America, with some notices of attempts made in South 
America. Of the very ancient lead-smelting processes of 
Asia, probably the earliest practised on a large scale in 
the world, and still believed to be in use in China and 
Japan, we do not find a word, Of recent methods in use 
in Japan there is a brief notice from Mr. Pumpelly at 
p. 384, and in China at p. 479. 
The first one hundred pages are occupied with the 
physical and chemical properties of lead viewed from 
the metallurgical stand-point, one which we cannot but 
think is always essentially misty and unsatisfactory. 
The physics and chemistry of any metal ought to 
be the same to everybody, and it seems to us 
ought to be fully and accurately known before 
ever the student opens a metallurgical book. If that 
be admissible, then metallurgy proper has its limits ad- 
vantageously defined and narrowed, and its treatises - 
ought to be then divided into two distinct classes—the one 
like the small octavo volume of Rammelsberg (that most 
elegant and classic work, now several years published, but 
yet as true and valuable in almost every page as when it 
was wet from the press), which teaches the principles of 
metallurgy, that is to say, the principles of those reactions 
which occur in the established and fully-adopted processes 
of commercial metallurgy, without going into any details 
as to apparatus, furnaces, or criticism, as to whether this 
or that method or construction of plant be better or worse. 
The other, consisting of of any attempt to aggregate 
in one volume the details of manufacturing apparatus, 
of trying to tell all about the minutize, of all the diver- 
sities of all the commercial metallurgies in the world 
—which, we are compelled to say, is impossible within 
even the very diffuse limits taken by Dr. Percy—will best 
consist, we think, of #onxographs, such as those of M. 
Griiner, in the Axnadles des Mines of a year or two back, 
on this subject of lead. Each one of these monographs, 
with the necessary plates of illustration, should really, 
and in a genuinely practical way, exhaust one single 
national or special system of smelting of lead, or of some 
one other metal. 
Such has been the plan almost universally adopted in 
Germany and France, and with results at once far more 
comprehensive, clear, and exact, than are practicable from 
the hand of any one man, however able, or in any volume 
| though bulky, illustrated only by woodcuts however ex- 
volumes on Copper, Zinc, and Iron that we opened Dr. | 
Percy’s present volume ; and, in finding a copious and 
well-arranged compilation, we have not been disappointed, 
although we might have anticipated something more of 
original research. 
It would, indeed, be improbable, with the great power 
of obtaining information directly from manufacturers 
necessarily belonging to the influence and position of a 
Professor at the Government School of Mines, that the 
result should be any other. Accordingly, the reader who 
desires to obtain a distinct and tolerably detailed though 

cellent, and those of Dr. Percy’s present volume are re- 
markably clear and good. 
For the practical and exhaustive description, in fact, of 
any single smelting process largely in commercial use, an 
atlas of folio copper plates, forming a volume in itself, is 
| indispensable. The result of the contrary view of the metal- 
lurgist’s descriptive task, is inevitably that want of balance, 
and yet incompleteness here and there, which characterise 
all these metallurgic volumes of Dr. Percy. Thus, for we 
feel bound to give an example to sustain our criticism, in his 
volume on Iron, Dr. Percy goes into the question of blow- 
ing machines, blast cylinders, and the like—a thing really 
as foreign to the metallurgy of iron as the theory and prac- 
tice of building chimney stalks would be to that of lead ; 

