for smelting have assumed colossal proportions, and are made to operate on 200 or 300 tons of materials at a time, giving out 10 tons of fluid metal at a single run. The manufacturer has thus gone on increasing the size of his smelting furnaces, and adapting to their use the blast apparatus of the requisite proportions, and has by this means lessened the cost of production in every way; his large furnaces require a great deal less labour to produce a given weight of iron than would have been required to produce it with a dozen furnaces; and in like manner he diminishes his cost of fuel, blast, and repairs, while he insures a uniformity in the result that never could have been arrived at by the use of a multiplicity of small furnaces.

While the manufacturer has shown himself fully alive to these advantages, he has still been under the necessity of leaving the succeeding operations to be carried out on a scale wholly at variance with the principles he has found so advantageous in the smelting department. It is true that hitherto no better method was known than the puddling process, in which from 400 lb. to 500 lb. of iron is all that can be operated upon at a time; and even this small quantity is divided into homoeopathic doses of some 70 lb. or 80 lb., each of which is moulded and fashioned by human labour, carefully watched and tended in the furnaces, and removed therefrom one at a time to be carefully manipulated and squeezed into form. When we consider the vast extent of the manufacture and the gigantic scale on which the early stages of the process is conducted, it is astonishing that no effort should have been made to raise the after-processes somewhat nearer to a level commensurate with the preceding ones, and thus rescue the trade from the trammels which have so long surrounded it.

Before concluding these remarks, I beg to call your attention to an important fact connected with the new process, which affords peculiar facilities for the manufacture of cast steel. At that stage of the process immediately following the boil, the whole of the crude iron has passed into the condition of cast steel of ordinary quality; by the continuation of the process the steel so produced gradually loses its small remaining portion of carbon, and passes successively from hard to soft steel, and from soft steel to steely iron, and eventually to very soft iron; hence, at a certain period of the process, any quality of metal may be obtained. There is one in particular, which, by way of distinction, I call semi-steel, being in hardness about midway between ordinary cast steel and soft malleable iron. This metal possesses the advantage of much greater tensile strength than soft iron. It is also more elastic, and does not readily take a permanent set; while it is much harder, and is not worn or indented so easily as soft iron, at the same time it is not so brittle or hard to work as ordinary cast steel. These qualities render it eminently well adapted to purposes where lightness and strength are specially required, or where there is much wear, as in the case of railway bars, which, from their softness and lamellar texture, soon become destroyed. The cost of semi- steel will be a fraction less than iron, because the loss of metal that takes place by oxidation in the converting vessel is about 2 1/2 per cent. less than it is with iron; but, as it is a little more difficult to roll, its cost per ton may fairly be considered to be the same as iron. But, as its tensile strength is some 30 or 40 per cent. greater than bar iron, it follows that for most purposes a much less weight of metal may be used, so that, taken in that way, the semi-steel will form a much cheaper metal than any with which we are at present acquainted.

In conclusion, allow me to observe that the facts which I have had the honour to bring before the meeting have not been elicited from mere laboratory experiments, but have been the result of working on a scale nearly twice as great as is pursued in our largest iron works: the experimental apparatus doing 7 cwt. in thirty minutes, while the ordinary puddling furnace makes only 4 1/2 cwt. in two hours, which is made into six separate balls, while the ingots or blooms are smooth, even prisms 10 in. square by 30 in. in length, weighing about equal to ten ordinary puddle-balls.

During the reading of the paper, I made a chalk sketch of the converter on the blackboard, and answered several questions put by members present; at its conclusion, an enthusiastic vote of thanks was accorded me:

On the table in front of the raised platform I had exhibited a few samples hastily got together for the occasion; one of them was a flat iron bar, about 3 1/2 in. wide by 3/4 in. in thickness, which had been rolled direct from a cast ingot at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, then under the superintendence of Colonel