Mr. T. Brown said he had taken great interest in this process, when it was first brought forward, after the meeting of the British Association, at Cheltenham. He had been sanguine of its success, even in opposition to the opinion of others, who had no faith in it from the commencement; and he had spent £7,000 in endeavouring to carry it out. It appeared to be thought that the quality of the iron ore had an important influence upon the success of the operation. Now, he had succeeded in making samples, equal perhaps to those exhibited, from spathose ores from the mines of the Ebbw Vale Company, in the Brendon Hills, Somersetshire, with a mixture of Pontypool iron. But the difficulty he experienced -- amounting, indeed, to an impracticability -- was in finding a completely refractory material for the furnace. He was astonished at the price which had been stated as that at which the article could be produced. He thought a very simple calculation was sufficient to disprove it; for the iron and the material , without manipulation, made up the amount; in fact, the article in its first state, supposing Indian pig-iron to be used, cost £6 l0s. per ton. He did not wish to say anything which could be looked upon as discouraging, because he had originally been one of the warmest supporters of the invention; but he believed Mr. Bessemer was now falling into the same error as to cost as he had done at Cheltenham. With regard to waste, under the most favourable circumstances, there was a loss in the manufacture of nearly 40 per cent. of metal; and on one occasion his agent informed him that the whole of the metal was consumed, and that nothing but cinder remained.

In 1862 I thought I had reason to fear the advent of a rival process brought forward by Mr. George Parry, of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works, whose name figures in a patent for the manufacture of iron and steel, bearings date November 18th, 1861.

Before making any further reference to this patent, I would remind those of my readers who are not practically acquainted with the details of my steel process, that it consists in decarburising iron which contains too much carbon to constitute steel, and in some cases this process of decarburisation is carried through every grade of steel until the carbon element is wholly removed, and soft malleable iron is the material arrived at. Now, in describing this operation in my patent, I made use of the well-known and ordinary terms by which iron in its various states of combination with carbon is commercially known; thus, I claimed to force air into and beneath the surface of molten crude iron (that is, molten iron as it leaves the blast furnace), or re-melted pig or cast iron (that is, re-melted, broken or useless castings). If, instead of using these trade terms, I had said that I claimed forcing air beneath the surface of carburet of iron, this would, in scientific language, not only have included these three ordinary qualities of iron, but it would have embraced any and every compound of iron and carbon from which I desired to eliminate the latter, and which was, in fact, the real object, meaning, and intention of my invention.

It must be remembered that my royalty of two pounds per ton on all ingots of iron or steel made by my process was holding out a great premium for the production of a carburet of iron for conversion into steel, which, from the nature of its manufacture, might so far differ from ordinary crude or pig iron as to remove it from the actual trade class of iron which I claimed to convert; such iron, even if it cost £1 per ton more than commercial pig iron, would avoid my royalty of £2, and save the patentee £1 per ton. The ostensible object of this patent of Mr. George Parry for the manufacture of iron and steel was to produce a superior quality of steel by the employment of malleable scrap iron in lieu of pig, or crude iron; for this purpose the scrap iron was melted with coke in a small blast furnace, from which it was run into a converter similar to mine, and blown with air forced upward through it by tuyères, the orifices of which were beneath the surface of the metal; all this was a pure and simple copy of my decarburising process. But the malleable iron scrap could not be fused when distributed and mixed up with lumps of coke in the blast furnace, without its absorbing about two per cent. of carbon, and thus producing white iron or forge pig; it would also absorb some sulphur from the coke, and would contain that amount of phosphorus which is always present in ordinary British bar-iron, and which is an inadmissible quantity in cast steel. The metal thus produced would, in fact, be crude iron, although the various impurities present might differ in proportion from those in ordinary blast furnace iron. Such iron would, further, be deficient in that necessary heat-producing element, silicon, which is always present in considerable quantity in all pig-iron suitable for the converting process; and this, combined with the deficiency of carbon, would form an absolute barrier to its conversion into fluid mild steel, as the necessary heat could not be