The Sun.
London, England, 1862-07-17 00:00:00

petnally in course of manufacture for "home con-
sumption," as the prospectuses say, and still more
frequently, we believe, for "exportation." We are
spinning iron out, as a protective sheathing for the
electric care of copper, in countless lengths for
telegraphic wires, both submarine and superterres-
trial. We have built blocks upon blocks of iron fire-
proof warehouses. We have almost all the various
appliances of civilised life fabricated in the same
protean and magically adaptible metal iron
fences, iron railings, iron gutters, iron hurdles, iron '
pumps, iron window frames, iron
pipings, iron
shutters, iron doors, iron spoutings, iron mile-posts,
(mile-stones becoming rapidly more and more of a
misnomer), iron street curbs, iron utensils and imple-
ments of every conceivable description, domestic and
agricultural. That inexhaustible Hnmourist, the
the author of the immortal ballad of " Miss Kil-
mansegg and her Precious Leg," would have found
a still more facil theme for his whimsicalities had
he imagined her leg constructed of Iron rather than
of Gold. Yet meeting us though it does at every
turn in some strange and wondrous metamorphose
—iron pours into our possession more rapidly than
we can turn it to our use. Even at this crowning
epoch in its History, when it is about to replace
in the form of iron ships -of - war the
old hearts -of - oak fleets that, manned by
other hearts of oak in the shape of our gallant tars
have won for England the glory of her maritime
supremacy. As to the rate of increase of late years
in our production of iron, as the " raw material"
for all these appliances, enough will have been said
when we have mentioned that, whereas in 1840 it
was a little less than 1,400,000 tons—and had risen
in 1854 to 2,700,000 tons—it absolutely exceeded
in 1860 the stupendous aggregate of 4,150,000 tons!
This in " pig iron," the rawest of the raw mate-
rial—in " paddled iron," that is iron partially ma-
nufactured—and in " wrought iron," or iron actu-
ally finished and ready for employment. A re-
viewer in the current number of the Edinburgh, in
the course of a singularly able and instructive paper
upon this subject, ingeniously compares these three
very different descriptions of iron —to render
their difference at once perfectly comprehensible
even to the uninitiated—the " pig iron" to
flour, the "puddled iron" to dough, and
" wrought iron" to the perfected loaf. A
comparison, by the way, all the more apt upon
consideration, when we reflect that "the staff
of life," by the processes of digestion, yields to our
system the wherewithal requisite for the fabrication
and repair of parts of our animal economy as
various as bone and muscle, nails and hair, veins
and arteries, blood and nerves! Typical all this of
the railroads and telegraphic wires, the houses and
the bridges, the implements and the machinery,
constantly in course of fabrication from iron by the
skill of our artificers. The Edinburgh Review, in
the brilliant and instructive article here referred to,
condenses within a very brief compass the epitome
of the "History of Iron," as relsted by Mr. FAIR-
BAIRN, the distinguished engineer. This survey,
rapid though it is, extends back to the Homeric
age, when, as the suffer remarks, iron was so rare
that a lump of it no bigger than a man could carry,
was deemed a prize not unworthy of being
struggled for in the funeral games of Paalto-
cLus. The marifest knowledge among the
Romans of the art of " increasing the blast and the
combustion of the furnaces," is duly recognised as
the sequel to the first of those three great inven-
tions, forming the" landmarks in the history of the
iron manufactures." The earliest of these three
great inventions, the starting point in those notable
annals being, of course the production of pig-iron—
say by TUBAL CAIN. DUDLEY'S discovery, imme-
diately before the date of the Commonwealth, of the
art of substituting common coke or coal for charcoal
in the smelting farnace being the second ! Finally
came the third and crowning discovery—the appli-
cation of the hot blast in lieu of the cold blast blown
into the furnace, thereby wondrously increasing the
combustive power obtained in the process of manu-
facture. This discovery of the hot blast dating back
only some three end-thirty-years from the present
date—the invention having been patented as re-
cently as 1829, br Mr. NEILSON of Glasgow, who
has the honour of being the inventor. From TUBAL
CAIN and DUD DUDLEY, and on to Mr. NEILSON
of Glasgow—behold the three great epochs
in the rise and development of the grand Cycloprean
system of the world's iron manufacture ! A system
so marvellously developed by this time that our car-
riages, our ships, our roads, our houses, our bridges,
are all capable of being made with iron—are being
made with iron in all directions ! That it were
easier to enumerate the things that are not made of
iron than those that are ! That our annual make
of iron—pig-iron, puddled-iron, wroughtiron—
is rapidly advancing here in the United Kingdom
alone from an aggregate of from 4,000,000 to
5,000,000 tons ! Truly this more than any pre-
vious epoch in the world's history is peculiarly
and essentially, as we have said, the Age of Iron.
One distinguished as such from all others not so
much by the universal use to which iron is put, but
by that fact over which the lovers 'of the arts of
civilization can notexult sufficiently, that exceptional
fact,which we cannot repeat too frequently, that it is
the first epoch in which the supply of iron exceeds
the demand, extraordinary though that demand is
known to be.

We entirely concur with Mr. HENLEY in the
plain common-sense view which he took of the
bill for the prevention of night poaching last night.
It will lead either to doubling or trebling the
county police, or to their being half killed by
poachers_ It is a bill for the open conversion of
the police into gentlemen's gamekeepers, and thus
preserving sport for these gentlemen, at the cost of
the general public. We have said sport, we ought
rather to say diversion or amusement. The game
preserving which gives rise to poaching is not for
anything so
manly as sport, but just enables the
effeminate modern fowl-shooter to station himself
where the game shill be driven to the muzzle of
his gun, to murder them by pop-shots. Were game
preserved only in the way and to the extent requi-
site for sport worthy of the name, we should hear
but little of poachers. As to rabbits and hares,
they have no business to exist, except in very
limited numbers, is a cultivated district, at all.
They are among root crops simple vermin which
dtstroy much more than they eat; and in fields of
young corn, they devour it before it comes into ear.

We are told by a
metropolitan journal that
game preserving has now become assimilated to
keeping poultry. We are sure no sportsman
would allow that it is so ; unless, indeed, he were
employing such a description in condemnation of
the practice of some of his landlord neighbours.
We have no objection whatever that that should
be done. We should desire nothing better than
the abolition of game laws, and the application
of the same laws to the preservation of any animals
whatever which any person
saw fit to keep
domestically, as to poultry. If I choose to keep
a tame magpie or raven, so that it can be recog-
nised as mine, why should I not be protected
in the possession of it. We only ask then
that these gentlemen poulterers who deal in
pheasants, partridges, hares, and rabbits should,
to such a reasonable extent, domesticate
and protect them, that they should lose the chargte.