The Sun. — 1862-07-17 (London, England)

TUBAL CAIN. DUDLEY'S discovery, immediately 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 application 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 manufacture. This discovery of the hot blast dating back only some three end-thirty-years from the present date—the invention having been patented as recently 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 carriages, 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 previous 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 requisite 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 recognised 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.