120 BRITISH ASSOCIATION TOR THE 



should have been made to raise the after-processes somewhat nearer to a level com- 

 mensurate with the preceding ones, and thus rescue the trade from the trammels 

 which have so long surrounded it. Before concluding these remarks, I beg to call 

 your attention to an important fact connected with the new process, which affords 

 peculiar facilities for the manufacture of east Bteel. At that stage of the process, 

 immediately following the boil, the whole of the crude iron has passed into the con- 

 dition of cast steel of ordinary quality. By the continuation of the process the steel 

 bo produced gradually loses its small remaining portion of carbon, and passes suc- 

 cessively from hard to soft steel, and from soft steel to steely iron, and eventually to 

 very soft iron ; hence, at a certain period of the process any quality of metal 

 may be obtained. There is one in particular, which, by way of distinction, I call 

 semi- steel, being in hardness about midway between ordinary cast steel and soft 

 malleable iron. This metal possesses the advantage of much greater tensile 

 strength than soft iron. It is also more elastic, and does not readily take a per- 

 manent set, while it is much harder and is not worn or indented so easily as soft 

 iron. At the same time it is not so brittle or hard to work as ordinary cast steel. 

 These qualities render it eminently well adapted to purposes where lightness and 

 strength are specially required, or where there is much wear, as in the case of 

 railway cars, which from their softness of texture soon become destroyed. The cost 

 of semi-steel will be a fraction less than iron, because the loss of metal that takes 

 place by oxidation in the converting vessel is about two and a-half per cent, less than 

 it is with iron ; but as it is a little more difficult to roll, its cost per ton may be 

 fairly considered to be the same as iron. But as its tensible strength is some 

 thirty or forty per cent, greater than bar iron, it follows that for most purposes a 

 much less weight of metal may be used ; so that taken in that way the semi-steel 

 will form a much cheaper metal than any we are at present acquainted with. The 

 facts which I have brought before the Meeting are not mere laboratory experi- 

 ments, but the result of working on a scale nearly twice as great as is pursued in 

 our largest ironworks — the experimental apparatus doing 7cwt. in thirty minutes 

 while the ordinary puddling furnace makes only 4-J-cwt. in two hours, which is 

 made into six separate balls, while the ingots or blooms are smooth, even prisms, 

 ten inches square by thirty inches in length, weighing about equal to ten ordinary 

 puddle balls. 



B.ESEARCHES IN THE CRIMEAN BOSPHORUS, AND ON THE SITE OF THE ANCIENT 

 GREEK CITY OF PANTICAPGEUM (KERTCH), BT DR. D. MACPHERSON. 



The present town of Kertch is built close to the site where 500 years d. c. the 

 Milesians founded a colony. About fifty years before Christ, this colony became 

 subject to Rome, or rather a Satrap of the Roman Empire, from the circumstance 

 of the Bosphorian kings, who were also rulers of Pontus, having been subdued by 

 this people in Asia, In the year 375 of onr era, the colony was utterly annihilated 

 by the Huns. Barbarous hordes succeeded one upon another thereafter until a. d. 

 1280, when the Genoese became posse?sors of the soil, and held it until expelled by 

 the Turks in 14*73; they being in their turn expelled in 1771 by the Russians. The 

 characteristic features around Kertch are the immense tumuli, or artiQcifil mounds 

 that abound in this locality, more especially within the second vallum. These 

 sepulchres of the ancient world are found in many places. We have them in the 

 form of barrows in England, and cairns in Scotland. Calculated as they are for 

 almost endless duration, they present the simplest and sublimest monument that 



