240 The Philippine Journal of Science 1914 



owners to the Constancia and Santa Lutgarda properties, which 

 are being worked in the meantime by the descendants of San- 

 tiago Hison. 



Iron smelting in the Philippines between the years 1784 and 

 1797 appears from the scant description on the record to have 

 accomplished first a reduction of the iron into balls (bolus) or 

 pasty masses which must have been somewhat malleable since 

 bolos and other forged implements were made from them.-* The 

 first smelting was undoubtedly done under the guidance of 

 Spaniards, and can scarcely be spoken of as a Filipino process, 

 but the present-day smelting bears less evidence of the influence 

 of the Spaniards than that of the Chinese, and is apparently 

 unique in many respects. 



The modern process has been described accurately and in de- 

 tail by McCaskey.-^ In it no attempt is made to produce any- 

 thing other than cast-iron plowshares and plowpoints. On this 

 account, the smelting process differs somewhat from the native 

 practice in Borneo, which produces a malleable iron and with 

 which Becker ^° has compared the Bulacan smelting. 



MINING 



In 1913 there were 10 furnaces in operation in the Bulacan 

 region — 2 at Montamorong, 3 at Hison, and I at each of the 

 deposits, Camaching, Santa Lutgarda, Santol, Tumotulo, and 

 Macatalinga. The practice in mining and smelting is similar 

 at each of these places, and the materials used in building the 

 furnaces at several of the smelters come from the same locality. 

 Some of the furnaces use ore containing only 50 per cent of 

 iron, but usually these ores are enriched by addition of scrap 

 iron to the charge. The smelting process has not changed 

 materially within the last fifty years. During the last few 

 months, however, several of the operators have been experiment- 

 ing by using different clays for the furnace lining or by adding 

 small quantities of limestone to the charge. 



The mining will require little description since it involves 

 only the breaking up of bowlders with hammers and bars or of 

 scraping the ore out of the shallow pits by similarly simple 

 methods. The ore is mined and sorted by the same laborers who 

 carry it in baskets to the smelter. The location of a smelter is 



^ Buzeta, Manuel, and Bravo, Felipe. Diccionario geografico, estadistico, 

 historia de Filipinas. Pena, Madrid (1851), 21. 

 -^ Loc. cit., 55 et seq. 

 ^ 21st Annual Rep. U. S. Geol. Surv. (1901), 584. 



