included in the definition that the product must be as free as possible
from all admixtures except the requisite amount of carbon. This is
"tool" steel. [Footnote: It must not be understood that tool steel was
always a cast metal. In manufacturing, iron bars were laid together in
a box or retort, together with powdered charcoal, and heated to a
certain degree for a certain time. The carbon from the charcoal was
absorbed by the iron, and from the blistered appearance of the bars when
taken out this product was, and is known as "blister" steel.]

And here occurs a strange thing. A skill in chemistry, the successor of
alchemy, is the educational product of the highest form of civilization.

[Illustration: ANCIENT SMELTING. A RUDE WALL ENCLOSING ALTERNATE LAYERS
OF IRON ORE AND CHARCOAL.]

Metallurgy is the highest and most difficult branch of chemistry. Steel
is the best result of metallurgy. Yet steel is one of the oldest
products of the race, and in lands that have been asleep since written
history began. Wendell Phillips in a lecture upon "The Lost Arts,"--
celebrated at the date of its delivery, but now obsolete because not
touching upon advances made in science since Phillips's day,--states
that the first needle ever made in England, in the time of Henry VIII,
was made by a Negro, and that when he died the art died with him. They
did not know how to prepare the steel or how to make the needle. He adds
that some of the earliest travelers in Africa found a tribe in the
interior who gave them better razors than the explorers had. Oriental
steel has been celebrated for ages as an inimitable product. It is
certainly true that by the simple processes of semi-barbarism the finest
tool-steel has been manufactured, perhaps from the days of Tubal Cain
downward. The keenness of edge, the temper whose secret is now unknown,