THE MANUFACTURE OF NICKEL. 557 



and after heating it red-hot, I passed a current of pure hydrogen gas 

 over it, and continued this until it had become cold. The grey metallic 

 shape thus produced was fused with a little borax in a crucible, lined 

 with pure alumina, and yielded a beautiful white silvery looking button 

 of the weight of 620 grains ; its specific gravity was 8 - 575, and it was 

 almost as soft as copper. Its malleability seemed very great indeed, for 

 a piece of it was rolled out nearly to the thinness of tinfoil ; it showed, 

 however, a disposition to tarnish after a lew days' exposure to the air, 

 and became then of a pale yellow colour, a kind of green sickness 

 tinge. Its magnetic properties were less dreaded than those of either 

 cobalt or iron ; and judging by the globular form and other evidences of 

 perfect fusion in the button, I believe that nickel is much more fusible 

 than the two metals just mentioned. When portions of it were melted 

 with copper and zinc in the quantities usually adopted to form albata, 

 it produced a compound vastly superior in appearance to any of the 

 miserable makeshifts that now disgrace our markets. Indeed, I am 

 quite convinced that it would well repay any respectable person to com- 

 mence the manufacture of pure nickel ; and it would not surprise me, 

 if a compound of aluminium and nickel could be found which, for 

 beauty of appearance, might equal silver and surpass it in durability 

 and freedom from sulphurous deterioration. Whilst alluding to the 

 advantages of an improvement in the manufacture of nickel, it may not 

 be amiss for me to notice two points of some importance in the way of 

 improvement. At present this extraction of nickel from the ore is made 

 to depend very much upon the affinity of arsenic for that, metal, so as to 

 form with it an arseniuret of easy fusibility, and sufficient specific gra- 

 vity to separate freely from the melted slag or gangrene ; and for this 

 purpose large quantities of arsenic are employed by the workmen, not 

 only to the detriment of their own health, but to the injury of their 

 neighbours. This pernicious practice is quite unnecessary, as I have 

 myself proved by experiments upon a large scale ; for example, after 

 roasting six hundred weight of the common ore of nickel, which is an 

 arsenio-sulphuret, I mixed it with half its weight of chalk, and threw 

 the mixture into a cupulo furnace in full blast ; the result was that the 

 lime of the chalk formed with the quartz and oxide of iron in the ore 

 a perfect flux, whilst the oxide of nickel, being reduced to the metallic 

 state, fell in that condition into the well of the cupulo, from whence 

 it was run out in a melted form and readily separated from the slag. 

 There was no apparent appreciable loss of nickel in this operation, 

 and the rough metal w r as found to contain 88 per cent, of pure nickel, 

 the rest being cobalt and iron, with a little sulphur, but no arsenic 

 coidd be detected in it ; moreover, this rough metal might, from the 

 cheapness of the process, have been profitably sold at 3s. per lb., 

 and was decidedly more pure than the ordinary commercial nickel. 



The other point to which I have alluded is applicable to the wet 

 mode of separating nickel, and depends upon a fact hitherto, I believe, 



