Production of a knife--Manufacture of iron--Raising
coal--The hot-blast--Iron bridges--Rolling bar-iron--Making
steel--Sheffield manufactures--Mining in Great
Britain--Numbers engaged in mines and metal manufactures.
We have been speaking somewhat fully of agricultural instruments and
agricultural labour, because they are at the root of all other
profitable industry. Bread and beef make the bone and sinew of the
workman. Ploughs and harrows and drills and thrashing-machines are
combinations of wood and iron. Rude nations have wooden ploughs. Unless
the English labourer made a plough out of two pieces of stick, and
carried it upon his shoulder to the field, as the toil-worn and poor
people of India do, he must have some iron about it. He cannot get iron
without machinery. He cannot get even his knife, his tool of all-work,
without machinery. From the first step to the last in the production of
a knife, machinery and scientific appliances have done the chief work.
People that have no science and no machinery sharpen a stone, or bit of
shell or bone, and cut or saw with it in the best way they can; and
after they have become very clever, they fasten it to a wooden handle
with a cord of bark. An Englishman examines two or three dozens of
knives, selects which he thinks the best, and pays a shilling for it,
the seller thanking him for his custom. The man who has nothing but the
bone or the shell would gladly toil a month for that which does not cost
an English labourer half a day's wages.
And how does the Englishman obtain his knife upon such easy terms? From
the very same cause that he obtains all his other accommodations
cheaper, in comparison with the ordinary wages of labour, than the
inhabitant of most other countries--that is, from the operations of
science, either in the making of the thing itself, or in procuring that
without which it could not be made. We must always remember that, if we
could not get the materials without scientific application, it would be
impossible for us to get what is made of those materials--even if we had
the power of fashioning those materials by the rudest labour.
Keeping this in mind, let us see how a knife could be obtained by a man
who had nothing to depend upon but his hands.
Ready-made, without the labour of some other man, a knife does not
exist; but the iron, of which the knife is made, is to be had. Very
little iron has ever been found in a native state, or fit for the
blacksmith. The little that has been found in that state has been found
only very lately; and if human art had not been able to procure any in
addition to that, gold would have been cheap as compared with iron.
Iron is, no doubt, very abundant in nature; but it is always mixed with
some other substance that not only renders it unfit for use, but hides
its qualities. It is found in the state of what is called _iron-stone_,
or _iron-ore_. Sometimes it is mixed with clay, at other times with lime
or with the earth of flint; and there are also cases in which it is
mixed with sulphur. In short, in the state in which iron is frequently
met with, it is a much more likely substance to be chosen for paving a
road, or building a wall, than for making a knife.
But suppose that the man knows the particular ore or stone that contains
the iron, how is he to get it out? Mere force will not do, for the iron
and the clay, or other substance, are so nicely mixed, that, though the
ore were ground to the finest powder, the grinder is no nearer the iron
than when he had a lump of a ton weight.
A man who has a block of wood has a wooden bowl in the heart of it; and
he can get it out too by labour. The knife will do it for him in time;
and if he take it to the turner, the turner with his machinery, his
lathe, and his gouge, will work it out for him in half an hour. The man
who has a lump of iron-ore has just as certainly a knife in the heart of
it; but no mere labour can work it out. Shape it as he may, it is not a
knife, or steel, or even iron--it is iron-ore; and dress it as he will,
it would not cut better than a brickbat--certainly not so well as the
shell or bone of the savage.
There must be knowledge before anything can be done in this case. We
must know what is mixed with the iron, and how to separate it. We cannot
do it by mere labour, as we can chip away the wood and get out the bowl;
and therefore we have recourse to fire.
In the ordinary mode of using it, fire would make matters worse. If we
put the material into the fire as a stone, we should probably receive it
back as slag or dross. We must, therefore, prepare our fuel. Our fire
must be hot, very hot; but if our fuel be wood we must burn it into
charcoal, or if it be coal into coke.
The charcoal, or coke, answers for one purpose; but we have still the
clay or other earth mixed with our iron, and how are we to get rid of
that? Pure clay, or pure lime, or pure earth of flint, remains stubborn
in our hottest fires; but when they are mixed in a proper proportion,
the one melts the other.
So charcoal or coke, and iron-stone or iron-ore, and limestone, are put
into a furnace; the charcoal or coke is lighted at the bottom, and wind
is blown into the furnace, at the bottom also. If that wind is not sent
in by machinery, and very powerful machinery too, the effect will be
little, and the work of the man great; but still it can be done.
In this furnace the lime and clay, or earth of flint, unite, and form a
sort of glass, which floats upon the surface. At the same time the
carbon, or pure charcoal, of the fuel, with the assistance of the
limestone, mixes with the stone, or ore, and melts the iron, which,
being heavier than the other matters, runs down to the bottom of the
furnace, and remains there till the workman lets it out by a hole made
at the bottom of the furnace for that purpose, and plugged with sand.
When the workman knows there is enough melted, or when the appointed
time arrives, he displaces the plug of sand with an iron rod, and the
melted iron runs out like water, and is conveyed into furrows made in
sand, where it cools, and the pieces formed in the principal furrows are
called "sows," and those in the furrows branching from them "pigs."
We are now advanced a considerable way towards the production of a
knife. We have the materials of a knife. We have the iron extracted out
of the iron-ore. Before we trace the progress of a knife to its final
polish, let us see what stupendous efforts of machinery have been
required to produce the cast iron.
In every part of the operation of making iron--in smelting the iron out
of the ore; in moulding cast iron into those articles for which it is
best adapted; in working malleable iron, and in applying it to use after
it is made; nothing can be done without fire, and the fuel that is used
in almost every stage of the business is coal. The coal trade and the
iron trade are thus so intimately connected, so very much dependent upon
each other, that neither of them could be carried on to any extent
without the other. The coal-mines supply fuel, and the iron-works give
mining tools, pumps, railroads, wheels, and steam-engines, in return. A
little coal might be got without the iron engines, and a little iron
might be made without coals, by the charcoal of wood. But the quantity
of both would be trifling in comparison. The wonderful amount of the
production of iron in Great Britain, and the cheapness of iron, as
compared with the extent of capital required for its manufacture, arises
from the fact that the coal-beds and the beds of iron-ore lie in
juxta-position. The iron-stones alternate with the beds of coal in
almost all our coal-fields; and thus the same mining undertakings
furnish the ore out of which iron is made and the fuel by which it is
smelted. If the coal were in the north, and the fuel in the south, the
carriage of the one to the other would double the cost.
There was a time when iron was made in this country with very little
machinery. Iron was manufactured here in the time of the Romans; but it
was made with great manual labour, and was consequently very dear.
Hutton, in his 'History of Birmingham,' tells us that there is a large
heap of cinders near that town which have been produced by an ancient
iron-furnace; and that from the quantity of cinders, as compared with
the mechanical powers possessed by our forefathers, the furnace must
have been constantly at work from the time of Julius Caesar. A furnace
with a steam blast would produce as large a heap in a few years.
At present a cottager in the south of England, where there is no coal in
the earth, may have a bushel of good coals delivered at the door of his
cottage for eighteen pence; although that is far more than the price of
coal at the pit's mouth. If he had even the means of transporting
himself and his family to the coal district, he could not, without
machinery, get a bushel of coals at the price of a year's work. Let us
see how a resolute man would proceed in such an undertaking.
The machinery, we will say, is gone. The mines are filled up, which the
greater part of them would be, with water, if the machinery were to stop
a single week. Let us suppose that the adventurous labourer knows
exactly the spot where the coal is to be found. This knowledge, in a
country that has never been searched for coals before, is no easy
matter, even to those who understand the subject best: it is the
province of geology to give that knowledge. But we shall suppose that he
gets over that difficulty too, for after it there is plenty of
difficulty before him.
Well, he comes to the exact spot that he seeks, and places himself right
over the seam of coal. That seam is only a hundred fathoms below the
surface, which depth he will, of course, reach in good time. To work he
goes; pares off the green sod with his shovel, loosens the earth with
his pickaxe, and, in the course of a week, is twenty feet down into the
loose earth and gravel, and clears the rock at the bottom. He rests
during the Sunday, and comes refreshed to his work on Monday morning;
when, behold, there are twelve feet of water in his pit.
Suppose he now calls in the aid of a bucket and rope, and that he bales
away, till, as night closes, he has lowered the water three feet. Next
morning it is up a foot and a half: but no matter; he has done
something, and next day he redoubles his efforts, and brings the water
down to only four feet. That is encouraging; but, from the depth, he now
works his bucket with more difficulty, and it is again a week before his
pit is dry. The weather changes; the rain comes down heavily; the
surface on which it falls is spongy; the rock which he has reached is
water-tight; and in twelve hours his pit is filled to the brim. It is in
vain to go on.
The sinking of a pit, even to a less depth than a hundred fathoms,
sometimes demands, notwithstanding all the improvements by machinery, a
sum of not less than a hundred pounds a fathom, or ten thousand pounds
for the whole pit; and therefore, supposing it possible for a single man
to do it at the rate of eighteen pence a day, the time which he would
require would be between four hundred and five hundred years.
Whence comes it that the labour of between four hundred and five hundred
years is reduced to a single day? and that which, independently of the
carriage, would have cost ten thousand pounds, is got for eighteen
pence? It is because man joins with man, and machinery is employed to do
the drudgery. Nations that have no machinery have no coal fires, and are
ignorant that there is hidden under the earth a substance which
contributes more, perhaps, to the health and comfort of the inhabitants
of Britain than any other commodity which they enjoy.
No nations have worked coal to anything approaching the extent in which
it has been worked by our countrymen. It has been calculated that
France, Belgium, Spain, Prussia, Bohemia, and the United States of
America, do not annually produce more than seventeen million tons of
coal, which is about half of our annual produce.[20]
[Illustration: Steam-Boiler making.]
The greater part of the coal now raised in Britain is produced by the
employment of the most enormous mechanical power. There are in some
places shallow and narrow pits, where coals may be raised to the surface
by a windlass; and there are others where horse-power is employed. But
the number of men that can work at a windlass, or the number of horses
that can be yoked to a gin, is limited. The power of the steam-engine is
limited only by the strength of the materials of which it is formed. The
power of a hundred horses, or of five hundred men, may be very easily
made by the steam-engine to act constantly, and on a single point; and
thus there is scarcely anything in the way of mere force which the
engine cannot be made to do. We have seen a pit in Staffordshire, which
hardly gave coal enough to maintain a cottager and his family, for he
worked the pit with imperfect machinery--with a half-starved ass applied
to a windlass. A mile off was a steam-engine of 200-horse power, raising
tons of coals and pumping out rivers of water with a force equal to at
least a thousand men. This vast force acted upon a point; and therefore
no advantage was gained over the machine by the opposing force of water,
or the weight of the material to be raised. Before the steam-engine was
invented, the produce of the coal-mines barely paid the expense of
working and keeping them dry; and had it not been for the steam-engines
and other machinery, the supply would long before now have dwindled into
a very small quantity, and the price would have become ten or twenty
times its present amount. The quantity of coal raised in Great Britain
was estimated by Professor Ansted in 1851 at thirty-five million tons;
and the value at nine millions sterling at the pit-mouth, and eighteen
millions at the place of consumption. The capital engaged in the coal
trade was then valued at ten millions. In 1847 the annual value of all
the precious metals raised throughout the world was estimated at
thirteen millions sterling. That value has been increased within a few
years. But the coal of Great Britain, as estimated by the cost at the
pit's mouth, is above two-thirds of this value of the precious metals
seven years ago; and the mean annual value, at the furnace, of iron
smelted by British coal being eight millions sterling, the value
together of our iron and our coal exceeds the value of all the gold and
silver of South America, and California, and Australia, however large
that amount has now become.
How the value of our cast iron has been increased by modern science may
be in some degree estimated by a consideration of what the hot-blast has
accomplished. The hot-blast blows hot air into the iron-furnace instead
of cold air. The notion seems simple, but the results are wonderful. The
inventor, Mr. Neilson, has seen since 1827 the production of iron raised
from less than seven hundred thousand tons to two million two hundred
thousand tons. The iron is greatly cheaper than a quarter of a century
ago, for only about one-half the coal formerly used is necessary for its
production. That production is almost unlimited in amount. In 1788 we
produced only sixty thousand tons, or one-thirty-sixth part of what we
now produce. The beautiful iron bridge of Colebrook-dale, erected in
1779, consumed three hundred and seventy-eight tons of cast iron. The
wonderful Britannia Bridge which has been carried over the Menai Strait,
hung in mid air at the height of a hundred feet above the stream, has
required ten thousand tons of iron for its completion. If chemistry and
machinery had not been at work to produce more iron and cheaper iron,
how would our great modern improvements have stopped short--our
railroads, our water-pipes, our gas-pipes, our steam-ships! How should
we have lacked the great material of every useful implement, from the
gigantic anchor that holds the man-of-war firm in her moorings, and the
mighty gun that, in the last resort, asserts a spirit without which all
material improvement cannot avert a nation's decay,--to the steel pen
with which thoughts are exchanged between friends at the opposite ends
of the earth, and the needle by which the poor seamstress in her garret
maintains her place amongst competing numbers.
[Illustration: The first iron bridge, Colebrook Dale.]
Nearly all the people now engaged in iron-works are supported by the
improvements that have been made in the manufacture, _by machinery_,
since 1788. Yes, wholly by the machinery; for before then the quantity
made by the charcoal of wood had fallen off one-fourth in forty-five
years. The wood for charcoal was becoming exhausted, and nothing but the
powerful blast of a machine will make iron with coke. Without the aid of
machinery the trade would have become extinct. The iron and the coal
employed in making it would have remained useless in the mines.
And now, having seen what is required to produce a "pig" of cast iron,
let us return to the knife, whose course of manufacture we traced a
little way.
The lump of cast iron as it leaves the furnace has many processes to go
through before it becomes fit for making a knife. It cannot be worked by
the hammer, or sharpened to a cutting edge; and so it must be made into
malleable iron,--into a kind of iron which, instead of melting in the
fire, will soften, and admit of being hammered into shape, or united by
the process of welding.
The methods by which this is accomplished vary; but they in general
consist in keeping the iron melted in a furnace, and stirring it with an
iron rake, till the blast of air in the furnace burns the greater part
of the carbon out of it. By this means it becomes tough; and, without
cooling, is taken from the furnace and repeatedly beaten by large
hammers, or squeezed through large rollers, until it becomes the
bar-iron of which so much use is made in every art of life.
[Illustration: Rolling bar-iron.]
About the close of the last century the great improvement in the
manufacture of bar-iron was introduced by passing it through grooved
rollers, instead of hammering it on the anvil; but in our own time the
invention has become most important. The inventor, Mr. Coet, spent a
fortune on the enterprise and died poor. His son, in 1812, petitioned
Parliament to assign him some reward for the great gift that his father
had bestowed upon the nation. He asked in vain. It is the common fate of
the ingenious and the learned; and it is well that life has some other
consolations for the man that has exercised his intellect more
profitably for the world than for himself, than the pride of the mere
capitalist, who thinks accumulation, and accumulation only, the chief
business of existence. Rolling bar-iron is one of the great
labour-saving principles that especially prevail in every branch of
manufacture in metals. The unaided strength of all the men in Britain
could not make all the iron which is at present made, though they did
nothing else. Machinery is therefore resorted to; and water-wheels,
steam-engines, and all sorts of powers are set to work in moving
hammers, turning rollers, and drawing rods and wires through holes, till
every workman can have the particular form which he wants. If it were
not for the machinery that is employed in the manufacture, no man could
obtain a spade for less than the price of a year's labour; the yokes of
a horse would cost more than the horse himself; and the farmer would
have to return to wooden plough-shares, and hoes made of sticks with
crooked ends.
After all this, the iron is not yet fit for a knife, at least for such a
knife as an Englishman may buy for a shilling. Many nations would,
however, be thankful for a little bit of it, and nations too in whose
countries there is no want of iron-ore. But they have no knowledge of
the method of making iron, and have no furnaces or machinery. When our
ships sail among the people of the eastern islands, those people do not
ask for gold. "Iron, iron!" is the call; and he who can exchange his
best commodity for a rusty nail or a bit of iron hoop is a fortunate
individual.
We are not satisfied with that in the best form, which is a treasure to
those people in the worst. We must have a knife, not of iron, but of
_steel_,--a substance that will bear a keen edge without either breaking
or bending. In order to get that, we must again change the nature of our
material.
How is that to be done? The oftener that iron is heated and hammered, it
becomes the softer and more ductile; and as the heating and hammering
forced the carbon out of it, if we give it the carbon back again, we
shall harden it; but it happens that we also give it other properties,
by restoring its carbon, when the iron has once been in a ductile state.
For this purpose, bars or pieces of iron are buried in powdered
charcoal, covered up in a vessel, and kept at a red heat for a greater
or less number of hours, according to the object desired. There are
niceties in the process, which it is not necessary to explain, that
produce the peculiar quality of steel, as distinguished from cast iron.
If the operation of heating the iron in charcoal is continued too long,
or the heat is too great, the iron becomes cast steel, and cannot be
welded; but if it is not melted in the operation, it can be worked with
the hammer in the same manner as iron.
In each case, however, it has acquired the property upon which the
keenness of the knife depends; and the chief difference between the cast
steel, and the steel that can bear to be hammered is, that cast steel
takes a keener edge, but is more easily broken.
[Illustration: Shear and Tilt Hammers: Steel-manufacture.]
The property which it has acquired is that of bearing to be tempered.
If it be made very hot, and plunged into cold water, and kept there till
it is quite cooled, it is so hard that it will cut iron, but it is
brittle. In this state the workman brightens the surface, and lays the
steel upon a piece of hot iron, and holds it to the fire till it becomes
of a colour which he knows from experience is a test of the proper state
of the process. Then he plunges it again into water, and it has the
degree of hardness that he wants.
The grinding a knife, and the polishing it, even when it has acquired
the requisite properties of steel, if they were not done by machinery,
would cost more than the whole price of a knife upon which machinery is
used. A travelling knife-grinder, with his treadle and wheels, has a
machine, but not a very perfect one. The Sheffield knife-maker grinds
the knife at first upon wheels of immense size, turned by water or
steam, and moving so quickly that they appear to stand still--the eye
cannot follow the motion. With these aids the original grinding and
polishing cost scarcely anything; while the travelling knife-grinder
charges two pence for the labour of himself and his wheel in just
sharpening it.
[Illustration: File-cutters.]
The "Sheffield whittle" is as old as the time of Edward III., as we know
from the poet Chaucer. Sheffield is still the metropolis of steel. It is
in the change of iron into steel by a due admixture of carbon--by
hammering, by casting, by melting--that the natural powers of Sheffield,
her water and her coal, have become of such value. Wherever there is a
stream with a fall, there is the grinding-wheel at work: and in hundreds
of workshops the nicer labour of the artificer is fashioning the steel
into every instrument which the art of man can devise, from the scythe
of the mower to the lancet of the surgeon. The machinery that made the
steel has called into action the skill that makes the file-cutter. No
machine can make a file. The file-cutter with a small hammer can cut
notch after notch in a piece of softened steel, without a guide or
gauge,--even to the number of a hundred notches in an inch. It is one
out of many things in which skilled labour triumphs over the uniformity
of operation which belongs to a machine. The cutting of files alone in
Great Britain gives employment to more than six thousand persons. This
is one of the many instances in which it is evident that the application
of machinery to the arts calls into action an almost infinite variety of
handicrafts. An ordinary workman can obtain a knife for the price of a
few hours' labour. The causes are easily seen. Every part of the labour
that can be done by machinery is so done. One turn of a wheel, one
stroke of a steam-engine, one pinch of a pair of rollers, or one blow of
a die, will do more in a second than a man could do in a month. One man,
also, has but one thing to do in connexion with the machinery; and when
the work of the hand succeeds to the work of the wheel or the roller,
the one man, like the file-cutter, has still but one thing to do. In
course of time he comes to do twenty times as much as if he were
constantly shifting from one thing to another. The value of the work
that a man does is not to be measured in all cases by the time and
trouble that it cost him individually, but by the market value of what
he produces; which value is determined, as far as labour is concerned,
by the price paid for doing it in the best and most expeditious mode.
And does not all this machinery, and this economy of labour, it may
still be said, deprive many workmen of employment? No. By these means
the iron trade gives bread to hundreds, where otherwise it would not
have given bread to one. There are more hands employed at the iron-works
than there would have been if there had been no machinery; because
without machinery men could not produce iron cheap enough to be
generally used.
The machinery that is now employed in the iron trade, not only enables
the people to be supplied cheaply with all sorts of articles of iron,
but it enables a great number of people to find employment, not in the
iron trade only, but in all other trades, who otherwise could not have
been employed; and it enables everybody to do more work with the same
exertion by giving them better tools; while it makes all more
comfortable by furnishing them with more commodious domestic utensils.
There are thousands of families on the face of the earth, that would be
glad to exchange all they have for a tin kettle, or an iron pot, which
can be bought anywhere in the three kingdoms for a shilling or two. And
could the poor man in this country but once see how even the rich man in
some other places must toil day after day before he can scrape or grind
a stone so as to be able to boil a little water in it, or make it serve
for a lamp, he would account himself a poor man no more. An English
gipsy carries about with him more of the conveniences of life than are
enjoyed by the chiefs or rulers in countries which naturally have much
finer climates than that of England. But they have no machinery, and
therefore they are wretched.
Great Britain is a country rich in other minerals than iron-stone and
coal. Our earliest ancestors are recorded to have exchanged tin with
maritime people who came to our shores. They had lead also, which was
cast into oblong blocks during the Roman occupation of the island, and
which bear the imperial stamp. At the beginning of the eighteenth
century we worked tin into pewter, which, in the shape of plates, had
superseded wooden trenchers. But we raised and smelted no copper,
importing it unwrought. The valuable tin and copper mines of Cornwall
were imperfectly worked in the middle of the last century, because the
water which overflowed them was only removed by hydraulic engines, the
best of which was introduced in 1700. When Watt had reconstructed the
steam-engine, steam-power began to be employed in draining the Cornwall
mines. In 1780, 24,443 tons of copper-ore were raised, producing 2932
tons of copper. In 1850, 155,025 tons of ore were obtained, producing
12,254 tons of copper. The tin-mines produced 1600 tons in 1750, and
10,719 tons in 1849. The produce of the lead-mines has not been
accurately estimated.
[Illustration: Entrance to the Mine of Odin, an ancient Lead-mine in
Derbyshire.]
In all mining operations, conducted as they are in modern times, and
in our own country, we must either go without the article produced,
whether coal, or iron, or lead, or copper, if the machines were
abolished,--or we must employ human labour, in works the most painful,
at a price which would not only render existence unbearable, but destroy
it altogether. The people, in that case, would be in the condition of
the unhappy natives of South America, when the Spaniards resolved to get
gold at any cost of human suffering. The Spaniards had no machines but
pickaxes and spades to put in the hands of the poor Indians. They
compelled them to labour incessantly with these, and half the people
were destroyed. Without machinery, in places where people can obtain
even valuable ore for nothing, the collection and preparation of metals
is hardly worth the labour. Mungo Park describes the sad condition of
the Africans who are always washing gold-dust;--and we have seen in
Derbyshire a poor man separating small particles of lead from the
limestone, or spar, of that country, and unable to earn a shilling a day
by the process. A man of capital erects lead-works, and in a year or two
obtains an adequate profit, and employs many labourers.
It may enable us, in addition to our slight notices of quantities
produced, to form something like an accurate conception of the vast
mineral industry of this country, if we give the aggregate of men
employed as miners and metal-workers, according to the census of 1851.
Of coal-miners there were 216,366; of iron-miners, 27,098; of
copper-miners, 18,468; of tin-miners, 12,912; of lead-miners, 21,617.
This is a total of 296,461. In the manufacture of various articles of
iron and steel, in addition to the iron and coal miners, who cannot be
accurately distinguished, there are employed 281,578 male workers, and
18,807 female; and in the manufacture of articles of brass and other
mixed metals, 46,076; of which number 8370 are females. The workers in
metal thus enumerated amount to 542,922. We may add, from the class of
persons engaged in mechanic productions, in which we find 48,050 engine
and machine makers, and 7429 gunsmiths, a number that will raise the
aggregate of miners and workers in metals to 600,000 persons. The
boldness of some of the operations which are conducted in this
department of industry, the various skill of the labourers, and the
vastness of the aggregate results, impress the mind with a sense of
power that almost belongs to the sublime. The fables of mythology are
tame when compared with these realities of science. Vulcan, with his
anvils in AEtna, is a feeble instrument by the side of the steam-hammer
that forges an anchor, or the hydraulic press that lifts a bridge. A
knot of Cupids co-operating for the fabrication of their barbed arrows
is the poetry of painting applied to the arts. But there is higher
poetry in that triumph of knowledge, and skill, and union of forces,
which fills a furnace with fifty thousand pounds of molten iron, and
conducts the red-hot stream to the enormous mould which is to produce a
cylinder without a flaw.
[Illustration: Cupids forging arrows. From Albani.]
[Illustration: Coal-Railway from South Hetton to Seaham Harbour, with
the ascending and descending Trains.]
[20] See a table by Professor Ansted in the Great Exhibition Catalogue,
vol. i. p. 181.