THE ELABORATION OF IRON AND STEEL.
"Nothing is new," and philosophy teaches us the same ; but we have heard the saying of the wise man tortured into a different meaning,—that nothing now exists which did not formerly have the same shape and character. In a word, that steamships ploughed the ancient waters before the days of Noah, and that the scream of the locomotive woke the echoes of the antediluvian world! The "Patent Office Reports" of the days of Methuselah would be very interesting if they existed; but, though Tubal-cain was an "instructor of every artificer in brass and iron," it is not very likely that his descendants ever attained to the perfection of modern iron-masters. If they did, the more favored posterity of Methuselah and Noah did not preserve the arts and sciences beyond the building of the Ark.
The antediluvians could not have been adepts in the manufacture of iron ; for that metal is a civilizer, and we are told that the " earth was filled with violence," and that the "imaginations" of men were "evil continually." Had they been industrious manufacturers, this would not have happened: they would have been too busy to breed mischief.
"Bronze or brass formed the principal tools, weapons, and metallic manufactures of the early ages and the half-civilized nations of modern times. Whatever may have been the original significance of the ancient poetic idea of a succession of the ages of gold, silver, brass, and iron, it appears to have had a real as well as an allegorical foundation in the world's history. We appear, in the literal sense at least, to have fallen emphatically upon the iron times,when the arts of life have rendered that metal more valuable even than gold, and susceptible of becoming, in the hands of the artificer, many hundredfold more precious, weight for weight, than the finest gold.
"At the time of the discovery and first settlement of America, the natives had in a very few instances advanced beyond that primitive stage of civilization in which the use of Metals was confined to trinkets of gold, silver, and copper, worn upon the person of the savage. Their most effective tools and weapons were sharpened flint-stones and
shells, and they possessed no other mode of felling a tree, or scooping a canoe from its trunk, than by the application of fire. Some tribes, more advanced, possessed, in addi tion to these rude ornaments and implements, the art of casting images and other figures in gold and silver, many of which are still found in the huacas or graves of the races. Chisels, hatchets, and a few other tools and weapons of copper, alloyed with tin, so as to cut wood with facility, were also made by the Peruvians and Mexicans, who thus appear to have reached the brazen era of civilization. Although the working of other metals thus everywhere preceded that of iron and steel, the use of these in the arts was early known.
"Implements not only of copper, so tempered—by a process no longer known—as to be elastic and cut granite with ease, but also iron, have come down to us from the Egyptians. Of the different nations of antiquity, including the Greeks and Romans, who possessed in considerable perfection the art of working iron and steel, the people of Chalybia, between India and the southern shores of the Black Sea, were the most celebrated, and especially excelled in the manufacture of steel. The Greeks appro priated the name of that country to designate steel of the best quality; and our own vocabularies still retain a synonym derived from that source. The 'northern iron' mentioned by Jeremiah, and the 'bright iron' of Ezekiel, in which the Tyrians traded, were probably the products of that country,—' the mother of iron,' as Scythia was called by a Greek poet.
" The early Britons are supposed to have been first supplied with iron from the same source, and were probably also taught the art of smelting it by the Phoenicians, who so early traded in this Pontic iron, which they bartered for the tin of Britain.