Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Century and a Half of Pittsburg and Her People, Vol. 2
W'hen Caesar invaded England his commentaries indicated that he found the early Britons using iron money, ' but nowhere does he intimate that they fought his armies with iron weapons. Iron was not so generally used in Great Britian in the early centuries as it was in other countries. The people of Scotland who invaded England in the reign of Edward II stole iron from the English in preference to any other plunder they could secure, Showing that it was a scarce article among them at home. The English people did not know that iron could be made without charcoal, and' for many centuries discouraged its manufacture, because the making of the necessary charcoal used up their forests too rapidly. Their supply of trees has always been limited, and they have wisely preserved them. Accordingly until they learned to smelt iron with coal or its products, of which they have an abundance, they encouraged the purchase of iron from Spain, Sweden and Russia, rather than its home manufacture. About 175 5 the efficacy of coke in smelting iron ore was. Discovered in England, and at once the manufacture of iron became more general. So they have had but few charcoal furnaces in England in the last one hundred and fifty years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
