ORIGIN OF THE SMELTING FURNACE.

Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette, 21 May 1913, Page 7

ORIGIN OF THE SMELTING FURNACE.

• The origin of the smelting furnace was traced in a recent lecture to the camp fire. If by chance 3 lump of ore, either of copper carbonate, tw? X' stone, or brown iron ore or haematite, had been one of the ring- of atones surrunding the camp or domestic fire, and had accidentally become" embedded in its embers, it would be reduced to metal. The metals which occur—native copper, gold, and iron—were the first to be known to man in the localities in which they occurred, but until the art of smelting metals had been invented the discovery and use of the native metals were insufficient to effect to »any great extent the old Stone " Age culture. Gold, though doubtless the first metal to be known in many localities, owing to its wide distribution in the sands of rivers, was useless for any practical purpose. Copper, however, or an alloy of the metal, with tin, antimony, or arsenic, was extracted from ores at a very remote period, and it or its alloys was the first to be applied to practical use. In fact, the first metal to be obtained by primitive man by smelting copper ores depended on their composition, and in the localities where tin did not occur it was 'a more or less impure copper. .

Happiness grows at our-firesides, and is not picked in strangers' gar-dens.—-Douglas Jerrold.

Men who cover themselves with glory sometimes find that they are very thinly clad. ,