GENEKAL EEPORT. 49 
iiortliern boundary of Illinois the theater of more successful 
mining operations than have yet been witnessed. 
Our iron mining, long in abeyance for want of capital, has 
likewise just now received an impetus from the establishment, 
at Milwaukee, of a large foundry and rolling mill at a cost of 
half a million of dollars, with the view of bringing into use 
larger amounts, than have been heretofore possible, of the val¬ 
uable iron deposits of Dodge county and other localities in our 
Stata 
Wisconsin is only second among the States in the extent of 
her iron ores—which, in respect to quality, are equal to the 
best in the world—and the time cannot be, or at least ought 
not to be, far distant when this very important element of 
wealth and power will receive the attention it so richly merits. 
LUMBEEING. 
This important interest still holds its relative rank among 
the leading industries of the State, if, indeed, it has not out¬ 
stripped some of the others. 
Eight years ago, the vast quantities of logs annually taken 
from the several lumbering districts were painfully suggestive 
of the time when exhausted” would have to be written 
across the entire chart of all our great forests. But year after 
year, with relentless and ever-increasing energy, the thousands 
of our lumbermen have gone forward with their ceaseless work, 
until within that short period scarcely less than five thousand 
millions feet more of lumber have been cut, manufactured and 
distributed over the country. And there, in primeval grandeur 
and solemn majesty, stand those same forests still, keeping 
sacred their interior mysteries, silently recording this present 
wdth the long centuries of their mighty past, and serenely de¬ 
fying the gathering hosts of invaders, which, as yet, only 
thunder at the outer gates of their unexplored solitudes I 
In 1860 the amount of lumber manufactured in Wisconsin 
was about 400,000,000 of feet The present annual product 
4 Ag. Trans. 
