726 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
circumstantially stated that a cylindrical wrought-iron pillar is now standing at 
the principal gate of the ancient mosque of the Kutub, near Delhi, in India, 
which is about sixty feet long, sixteen inches in diameter near the base, contains 
about eighty cubic feet of metal, and weighs f)robably over seventeen tons. The 
immense proportions of this pillar are not more striking than its ornate finish. 
An inscription in Sanscrit is variously interpreted to assign its erection to the 
ninth or tenth century before the Christian era or to the early part of the fourth 
century after it. In the ruins of Indian temples there have been found wrought- 
iron beams similar in size and appearance to those used in the construction of 
buildings at the present time. Metallurgists are unable to understand how these 
large masses of iron could have been forged by a people who appear not to have 
possessed any of the mechanical appliances for their manufacture which are now 
necessary to the production of similar articles. 
The period at which China first made iron is uncertain, but great antiquity 
is claimed for its manufacture in that mysterious country. In a Chinese record 
which is supposed to have been written two thousand years before Christ iron is 
mentioned, and in other ancient Chinese writings iron and steel are both men- 
tioned. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century of the Christian era, thus 
speaks of the iron of China, the inhabitants of which were known in his day as 
the Seres: " Howbeit, as many kinds of iron as there be, none shall match in 
goodness the steel that cometh from the Seres, for this commodity also, as hard 
ware as it is, they send and sell with their soft silks and fine furs. In a second 
degree of goodness may be placed the Parthian iron." 
It may be assumed as susceptible of proof that the knowledge of the use of 
iron, if not of its manufacture, was common to all the people of Asia and North- 
ern Africa long previous to the Christian era. The Phoenicians would carry this 
knowledge to their own great colony, Carthage, which was founded in the ninth 
century before Christ, and to all the colonies and nations inhabiting the shores of 
the Mediterranean. Phoenician merchants obtained iron from such distant 
countries as Morocco and Spain, and possibly even from India and China, as 
well as from nearer sources. But in time the merchants of Tyre and the " ships 
of Tarshish" deserted the places that long had known them, empire after empire 
fell in ruins, and with the fading away of Asiatic and African civilization and 
magnificence the manufacture and the use of iron in Asia and Africa ceased to 
advance. Egypt has probably not made iron for nearly three thousand years, 
and probably no more iron is made in all Asia to-day than was made in its bor- 
ders twenty-five centuries ago, when Babylon was "the glory of kingdoms, the 
beauty of the Chaldees' excellency." — U. S. lOth Census Report. 
