ECONOMICAL GEOLOGY. 
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Siemens and the Bessemer processes, and the steel manufacture generally.” 
“ The quantity of ore is limitless.” 
“ It would be the best policy to bring the ores to nature on the spot. 
Small charcoal blast-furnaces and groups of Catalan forges, are possible in 
a country so well provided with wood, and where any amount of labor 
can be got at the lowest price. The geology is all right ; the mineralogy 
is all right ; the region is a good one ; population numerous ; food plenty ; 
labor abundant and cheap ; railroads at hand.” The range is crossed by 
two lines of railroad, and portions of it lie within 5 miles of a third. 
Another probable advantage is the proximity of the Dan river coal. 
Although no satisfactory exposures of this coal have been made, yet there 
are good reasons for believing that it is both abundant and of good quality, 
from some explorations recently made by the North Carolina Centre Iron 
and Mining Company, about Stokesburg, and from the results of the trial 
of the coal from the shaft near Leaksville, during the late war. 
The views of Dr. Lesley have been presented at some length, not only 
because, being from another state, and that a large iron manufacturing 
state, his opinions may be supposed to be given without bias, butclfiefly 
because of his eminence as a geologist and especially as the highest au- 
thority in this country in everything connected with the geology, minera- 
logy and metallurgy of iron. 
Any one who has the least knowledge of the present drift of the iron 
industry of the world, and of the controlling importance of high grade 
ores, is prepared to realize the immense value of such deposits as those 
just described in Guildford and in Harnett, Chatham, Orange and Halifax. 
For the manufacture of the common qualities of iron, England has un- 
equalled advantages in her wonderful Cleaveland beds of fossil ore, and 
her clay iron stones and black band ores, mined in unlimited quantities 
from the same pit with the coal by which it is smelted. But for ores of 
the better class, adapted to the Bessemer and other processes for steel- 
inaking, and for the better kinds of iron, England is already confessedly 
dependent, in a large measure, on other countries. Her principal domes- 
tic resource is the Cumberland red hematites. And nothing could be 
more precarious than the supply from this source. This hematite is 
compact and mammillary, of a brick-red color, and occurs in pockets and 
irregular masses, of the most uncertain forms, distribution and magnitude. 
In fact the masses are simply the fillings of cavities of the most irregular 
and lawless shapes and forms which had been dissolved out the paleozoic 
limestones in which these ores occur. So that each mass or pocket has 
to be sought for and mined independently. And but for the introduction 
of the American Diamond Drill, it is difficult to understand how profita- 
