placed on the anvil, and repeatedly beaten by the large iron hammer that is
raised by the cams of an axle turned by a water-wheel. Not long afterward
it is taken up with tongs and placed under the same hammer, and cut up with
a sharp iron into four, five, or six pieces, according to whether it is large or
small. These pieces, after they have been re-heated in the blacksmith's forge
and again placed on the anvil, are shaped by the smith into square bars or into
ploughshares or tyres, but mainly into bars. Four, six, or eight of these bars
weigh one-fifth of a ceniumpondtum, and from these they make various implements. During the blows from the hammer by which it is shaped by the smith,
a youth pours water with a ladle on to the glowing iron, and this is why the
blows make such a loud sound that they may be heard a long distance from
the works. The masses, if they remain and settle in the crucible of the
furnace in which the iron is smelted, become hard iron which can only be
hammered with difficulty, and from these they make the iron-shod heads for
the stamps, and such-like very hard articles.
But to iron ore which is cupriferous, or which when heated56 melts
with difficulty, it is necessary for us to give a fiercer fire and more labour ;
because not only must we separate the parts of it in which there is metal from
those in which there is no metal, and break it up by dry stamps, but we must
also roast it, so that the other metals and noxious juices may be exhaled ;
and we must wash it, so that the fighter parts may be separated from it.
Such ores are smelted in a furnace similar to the blast furnace, but much
wider and higher, so that it may hold a great quantity of ore and much
charcoal ; mounting the stairs at the side of the furnace, the smelters fill
it partly with fragments of ore not larger than nuts, and partly with
charcoal ; and from this kind of ore once or twice smelted they make iron
which is suitable for re-heating in the blacksmith's forge, after it is flattened
out with the large iron hammer and cut into pieces with the sharp iron.
By skill with fire and fluxes is made that kind of iron from which steel
is made, which the Greeks call στομωμα. Iron should be selected which
is easy to melt, is hard and malleable. Now although iron may be
smelted from ore which contains other metals, yet it is then either soft
or brittle ; such (iron) must be broken up into small pieces when it is
(Brass is modern poetic licence foi copper or bronze). Also, in the Odyssey (ix, 465) when
Homer describes how Ulysses plunged the stake into Cyclop's eye, we have the first positive
evidence of steel, although hard iron mentioned in the Tribute of Yü, above referred to, is
sometimes given as steel :
" And as when armourers temper in the ford
" The keen-edg'd pole-axe, or the shining sword,
" The red-hot metal hisses in the lake."
No doubt early wrought-iron was made in the same manner as Agricola describes. We
are, however, not so clear as to the methods of making steel. Under primitive methods of
making wrought-iron it is quite possible to carburize the iron sufficiently to make steel direct
from ore. The primitive method of India and Japan was to enclose lumps of wrought-iron in
sealed crucibles with charcoal and sawdust, and heat them over a long period. Neither Pliny
nor any of the other authors of the period previous to the Christian Era give us much help
on steel metallurgy, although certain obscure expressions of Aristotle have been called upon
(for instance, St. John V. Day, Prehistoric Use of Iron and Steel, London, 1877, p. 134) to
prove its manufacture by immersing wrought-iron in molten cast-iron.
S9Quae vel aerosa est, vel coda. It is by no means certain that cocta, " cooked " is
rightly translated, for the author has not hitherto used this expression for heated. This may
be residues from roasting and leaching pyrites for vitriol, etc.
