1842.] Notes on the Iron of the Kasia Hills. 855 



are made of a fine white clay, a quantity of which was furnished to 

 Dr. O'Shaughnessy for his experiments in Pottery. 



The iron sand is wetted and placed on a shelf. At short intervals 

 a handful of fern leaves is dipped into the sand, and shoved into the 

 furnace, and charcoal to replenish the fire is poured down the chim- 

 ney. In some villages, instead of using the fern, as ahove described, 

 the ore is mixed with pounded charcoal and placed on the shelf. The 

 person who works the bellows, at almost every other sway of his body 

 takes up a pinch of the mixture, with a long handled spoon, and drops 

 it into the chimney. 



After an interval (which from the equal size of the masses, must be 

 very regular, though judged by guess,) one of the workmen stirs up the 

 mass with the poker (M), takes it out with the tongs (N), lays it on a 

 block covered with earth, beats it with a wooden club into a sort of hemis- 

 phere, and then splits it nearly in twain with axe (O), which like most 

 other Kasia cutting and digging tools, has a heavy-headed handle and a 

 very acute angle. He opens the split further by the insertion of a 

 couple of wedges, and then pitches the hot mass (P) into a trough full 

 of pounded dross, to cool. The metal, impure as it is, is now sent to 

 market all over the hills, and to the plains of Sylhet. The loss of iron 

 purchased in this form is at least three parts in four. Heating in the 

 furnace and hammering, form the only further process of purification. 



The Kasia tools appear generally to be of impure iron, though their 

 edges are often good and serviceable, being formed of steel, and welded 

 to the rough blade. The Nagas to the eastward, though said to be 

 much more savage in their habits than the Kasias, appear (judging 

 from their weapons of war) to have much more skill in refining iron. 

 The excavation is only carried on in the height of the rains, as the 

 streams employed in their plan of washing the iron are only then 

 full. Perhaps one year's excavation occupies only twenty days ! and 

 it may be still fewer, as the rain in that district does not come near 

 the Cherra mark of thirty inches in twenty-four hours. From four 

 to ten rupees annual rent is paid for a mine, where the proprietor is not 

 the excavator. The men employed as miners receive four annas a day, 

 and will excavate in twenty days in a good mine, the value of twenty 

 five or thirty rupees each. Thus the statement of expense and profit in 

 a good mine for a season of twenty days, will be as follows : — 



