industry in America, great for the time and circumstances, independence
could not have been won, and even the _feeling_ and desire of
independence would have been indefinitely delayed.

The industry was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic
arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular
energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms
that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human
arm with which to subdue the boundless savagery of a continent, and win
independence and form a nation besides. The demand for huge masses of
the most essential of the factors of civilization has grown since,
because the ironclad and the big gun have come, and those inadequate
forces and crude methods supplied for a time the demand that was small
and imperative. The largest mass made then, and frequently spoken of in
colonial records, was a piece called a "sow;" spelled then "sowe." It
was a long, triangular mass, cast by being run into a trench made in
sand. [Footnote: When, later, little side-trenches were made beside the
first, with little channels to carry the metal into them, the smaller
castings were naturally called "pigges." Hence our "pig-iron."]

[Illustration: MAKING A TRENCH TO CAST A "SOWE."]

Those were the palmy days of the "trip hammer." Nasmyth was not born
until 1808, and no machine inventor had yet come upon the scene. The
steam-hammer that bears his name, which means a ponderous and powerful
machine in which the hammer is lifted by the direct action of steam in a
piston, the lower end of whose rod is the hammer-head, has done more for
the development of the iron industry than any other mechanical
invention. It was not actually used until 1842, or '43. It finally, with
many improvements in detail, grew into a monster, the hammer-head, or