MANUFACTURE OF IRON AND STEEL. 605 
masses of metal. A few minutes’ reflection will show the 
great anomaly presented by the scale on which the consecutive 
processes of iron making are at present carried on. The 
little furnaces originally used for smelting ore have been from 
time to time increased in size, until they have assumed 
colossal proportions, and are made to operate on two or three 
hundred tons of materials at a time, giving out ten tons of 
fluid metal at a single run. The manufacturer has thus gone 
on increasing the size of his smelting furnaces, and adapting 
to their use the blast apparatus of the requisite proportions, 
and has by this means lessened the cost of production in every 
way. His large furnaces require a great deal less labour to 
produce a given weight of iron than would have been required 
to produce it with a dozen furnaces ; and in like manner he 
diminishes his cost of fuel blast and repairs, while he ensures 
a uniformity in the result that never could have been arrived 
at by the use of a multiplicity of small furnaces. While the 
manufacturer has shown himself fully alive to these advan- 
tages, he has still been under the necessity of leaving the 
succeeding operations to be carried out on a scale wholly at 
variance with the principles he has found so advantageous in 
the smelting department. It is true that hitherto no better 
method was known than the puddling process, in which from 
4001b. to 500 lb. weight of iron is all that can be operated 
upon at a time ; and even this small quantity is divided into 
homoeopathic doses of some 70 lb. or 80 lb., each of which is 
moulded and fashioned by human labour, and carefully 
watched and tended in the furnace, and removed therefrom 
one at a time, to be carefully manipulated and squeezed into 
form. When we consider the vast extent of the manufacture, 
and the gigantic scale on which the early stages of the process 
is conducted, it is astonishing that no effort should have been 
made to raise the after-processes somewhat nearer to a level 
commensurate 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 cast steel. 
At that stage of the process immediately following the boil, 
the whole of the crude iron has passed into the condition of 
cast steel of ordinary quality. By the continuation of the 
process, the steel so produced gradually loses its small 
remaining portion of carbon, and passes successively 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 
