EXPOSITION OF 1867. 
883 
long. English and French railway companies are already lay¬ 
ing steel tracks, not only in the vicinity of great cities, where 
the wear is greater, but throughout the whole length of exten¬ 
sive lines. While the writer was abroad, the Paris, Lyons & 
Mediterranean Kailroad Co., had already ordered 137^000 tons 
of Bessemer steel rail for their road, and were vigorously at 
work putting them down the whole length of their line, over 
500 miles. . 
The popular notion that the best of steel can only come from 
Swedish iron is believed not to be well founded. When thev 
V 
are better known, the magnetic ores of Wisconsin and Michi¬ 
gan will be recognized as scarcely less valuable for such uses. 
The manufacture of glass and pottery ware, terra cotta and 
brick has also derived great advantage from numerous appli¬ 
cations of the principles embodied in the Siemens furnace, as 
the process may not only be carried on continuously, but with 
less consumption of fuel, and less expense generally. I found, 
at Vienna, a single brick manufacturer who was employing 
nineteen of these furnaces and 4,500 men, with an annual 
product of 198,000,000 brick. 
The coal mines and forests of the world were well represented 
at the Exposition ; massive specimens of coal, weighing seve¬ 
ral tons, nobly declaring the supremacy of America—not in 
the amount produced, for England leads the world in that, but 
in the extent of the sup})ly—and suggesting to the reflecting 
mind greater economy than is now practiced in the use of fuel 
of every kind. 
A short time since. Sir William Armstrong, as President of 
the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 
raised the alarm on the coal question, declaring that at the 
present rate of production, with a reasonable increase, the 
coal deposits of Great Britain would be consumed within two 
hundred years. The thought of prospective exhaustion is also 
being awakened in the minds of the statesmen of other coun¬ 
tries, and inventive genius has been of late turned in the di¬ 
rection of improved methods of consumption. At present, 
scarcely less than one-third of all the fuel consumed, whether 
