62 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
Tlie command of the Creator to man was that he “ replenish 
the earth and subclue it.” That he is fulfilling this, will, we 
think, be admitted by all who will reflect on the perils of the 
miner’s subterranean toils, to procure a crude and uninteresting 
stone, — and will follow us as we endeavour concisely to describe 
the more important processes to which this is subjected, and the 
purposes to which its products are eventually applied. 
Let not our readers suppose that a technical paper on the 
properties of iron is intended. We refer all who desire detailed 
information to the works of Percy, of Fairbaim, of Phillips, 
and others ; our purpose being, to interest the least technical 
mind, by describing the curiosities of a manufacture which has 
given to England her commercial supremacy, and by the power 
of which she holds the key to all the markets of the world. 
Iron has been made in England from the earliest times. In 
the same manner as the native of the Himalayan mountains now 
builds his rude furnace of clay, lights his wood fire, and charges 
it with iron-ore, — urging it by the blasts of his sheep-skin bel- 
lows, until he obtains his small lump of “ wootz,” — so did the 
first iron-makers in Britain — probably before Caesar came ; and 
they have left us their “ old cinders,” and them “ bloomaries,” 
to inform us how perseveringly, even in the childhood of our 
race, our forefathers sought to avail themselves of the mineral 
treasures of the land. 
In the Forest of Dean, on the hills of Cleveland, in the valley 
of Furness • wherever, indeed, man now pursues his search for 
the ores of iron, he finds the evidences of ancient workings. 
The history, however, of iron manufacture in this country is 
extremely obscure. That it was considered of great importance, 
is proved from the circumstance that the chief smith was an 
officer of considerable dignity amongst the Anglo-Saxons. In 
the courts of the Welsh sovereigns, the king’s smith sat next 
the domestic chaplain, and he “was entitled to a draught of 
every kind of liquor that was brought into the hall • ” and 
at the time of, and long after, the Conquest, every military 
chieftain maintained his smith, to whom many peculiar privileges 
were allowed. Tradition points to the Northmen as the most 
important iron-smelters ; the heaps of scoria) existing in many 
parts of England being still called “Danes’ Cinders.” When we 
begin to have anytrue history of these metallurgical operations, 
we find the seat of our iron manufacture in the eastern and 
south-eastern counties. The Green- Sand formations, which 
extend from the Humber, on our north-eastern shores, to the 
southern coast, near Dorchester, yielded abundance of iron-ore ; 
and the counties of Suffolk, Essex, Kent, and Sussex, were 
thickly covered with timber trees, from which charcoal in large 
quantities was made. With these facilities for making iron, 
