were thirty miles of railway in Great Britain; to-day there are 20,000, representing a capital of over a thousand millions. And it is to railway building all over the world that we owe principally the development of our iron and steel, and mechanical: industries. What that development has meant to the prosperity of the country may be gathered from the fact that in' 1837 Great Britain's production of pig-iron did not exceed 1,120,000 tons, whilst in 1896 we produced over eight million tons and imported five millions. It has been said that the civilisation of a country may be counted by its consumption. of iron; measure then the progress of the United Kingdom in sixty years! In 1837 about 100 Ibs. of raw metal was produced per head of the population: in 1897 every Briton's quota of pig" is about 700 Ibs. tis one of the greatest glories of the Anglo-Saxon race that mankind is indebted to it for every great step in the work of fashioning dead ore into the patient powerful slave of man. From the. time of Dudley, who invented the smelting of iron with coke, to the Stephensons and the Brunels, England had shown the way in the practical application of metalling and mechanics. She has maintained it during the Victorian reign, thanks to such brilliant inventors as Bessemer, Siemens, Bell, Gilchrist, Brunel, Armstrong, and Whitworth. Sir Henry Bessemer's converter, the invention of which was made public in 1856, enabled a metal to be produced serving the purposes of wrought-iron, and costing-less than a third. The substitution of the converter for the crucible, made of the Age of Iron the AgeofSteel. The Siemens-Martin or " open-hearth" process, dealt another blow at the puddling-furnace. Tt enables cast steel of a tensile strength and tenacity resembling those of wrought-and at a cost considerably less, "Lastly iron to be produced of greater lightness comes the " basic" process of Mr: Gilchrist, by which not only the hrematite ores of Spain, but the ordinary phosphoric iron-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.