168 



his process is exactly the same as the Japanese ; but it is necessarily 

 practised on a very small scale, the amount of iron operated on by the 

 blowing process, at any time, being limited to so much as will form 

 the point and shank of a horse-shoe nail. 



My inquiries have failed to trace the history of this process or its 

 antiquity in England ; but I find it is now practised extensively at Wol- 

 verhampton, and in some other places ; and I would be disposed to con- 

 clude that it had been very generally practised in England, probably by 

 the gipsies,"^' long before Inman introduced it into Dublin, on account 

 of the old belief or impression, which is certainly older than fifty years, 

 that the barrels made for fowling-pieces and pistols from old horse-shoe 

 nail iron were less likely to burst than those made out of any other de- 

 nomination of European iron, and were as safe as the best barrels made 

 of Damascus iron, or its Spanish imitations. Thus comparing or placing 

 the horse-shoe nail iron on a par with the Damascus, which, in the 

 East, where great attention was given to fire-arms, was considered the 

 best. The real or supposed similitude in the quality of the best Euro- 

 pean and Asiatic irons, used for gun-barrels, would lead one to suspect 

 that the irons they are made of had somehow gone through the same 

 or an analogous process of being blown with cold air when hot, and been 

 partially burned; and that this operation had given to all of them 

 their peculiar toughness, due to a striated or filamentous structure, 

 which obliterated the original crystalline arrangement of their particles, 

 a change in the quality of the iron which is said to be eff'ected by the 

 Bessemer process of blowing the liquid metal with cold air. 



It is this similitude in the organic structure of the iron of the bar- 

 rels of guns made of horse-shoe nail iron, and of Damascus twisted iron, 

 that leads me to infer that the Asiatic iron there used, though not pro- 

 cured in Japan, must have been cold blown, and partially burned when 

 hot, like that tough iron we obtain from the welding together of bun- 

 dles of horse-shoe nails made of cold-blown nail-rod iron. 



In reducing the iron used in Damascus, the button found in the 

 bottom of the crucible is said to be hammered into a small bar, which 

 bar we may consider equivalent to a horse-shoe nail ; but whether it is 

 also blown in the process of hammering it out, or not, I am not able to 

 say, though I would suspect it was, because the blowing would enable 



than the iron or steel tools, within the time necessary to fashion the nail. This process 

 with the stones points to Africa for its origin ; but the several processes of burning a por- 

 tion of the iron we have to consider in this paper all point to central Asia, noticed by 

 the prophet Jeremiah for the peculiarity or superiority of its northern iron or steel. 



* If the process of blowing the heated nail-rod be Asiatic, its introduction into Eng- 

 land may be due to the gipsies, who are iron-smiths by profession, and possibly, as their 

 language indicates, from northern Asia, and probably inheritors of many secrets of the iron 

 craft, and this one amongst others. It looks also as if the secret of the pokrity of mag- 

 netic iron ore, or the loadstone and magnet, had been known also to the gipsies before 

 its adoption for scientific purposes, — as some navigators objected to its use at all, on the 

 score that it had been previously used by fortune-tellers and cheats for purposes of decep- 

 tion ; and, as the gipsies led the way in this delusion, they may be the parties alluded to. 



