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EXPLANATORY REPORTS ON NEW 
SCIENTIFIC PROCESSES AND INVENTIONS. 
[These Reports 
be impartial 
Ed. J. S.] 
will not partake of the nature of an Advertisement, but will 
descriptions, written and signed by well-known Specialists. — 
Hollway’s Process for Reducing Metallic Sulphides 
without External Fuel. 
Excepting in gunpowder, matches, and the Bessemer converter, 
the only elements hitherto used on a practical scale as artificial 
fuel have been carbon and hydrogen. This affirmation must, 
however, be limited in its application to the world in which we 
at present reside, as we are told of another place where the chief 
fuel is sulphur. Prometheus scaled Olympus, and from its 
celestial heights brought down upon lower earth the fire of the 
gods. Mr. Hollway has travelled in the opposite direction, and 
now shows us how we may here make use of sulphur as a fuel 
for the important work of smelting metals. 
The combustibility of sulphur having been so long and so 
popularly understood, and the faC that it is so large a constituent 
of so many of the commonest ores of common metals being so 
well known, it is strange that this revelation should have been 
delayed so long. 
The principle of the process is extremely simple. It consists 
merely in applying a small quantity of ordinary fuel to a natural 
compound of metal and sulphur, and having thus started the 
combustion, just as we use paper and firewood to start a coal 
fire, allowing it to proceed with the aid of nothing more than an 
efficient blast of air. Thus the sulphur which stands in the ore 
as the impurity to be removed effects its own removal by a fiery 
immolation, and the heat it gives out in this suicidal proceeding 
fuses, and in some cases completes the reguline separation of 
the metal. 
This extreme simplicity lies, however, all in the principle ; the 
practical and profitable applications demand some ingenuity in 
devising the necessary apparatus and arrangements for con- 
ducing the process with the greatest possible economy, and 
utilising the by-producfts, the value of which constitutes an 
essential commercial feature of the invention. Unlike coal and 
other hydrocarbons, sulphur in burning produces a compound 
more valuable than the combustible itself. Besides the sul- 
phurous acid produced by the combustion of the sulphur of the 
