3. "HENCE dusky IRON sleeps in dark abodes,
And ferny foliage nestles in the nodes;
185 Till with wide lungs the panting bellows blow,
And waked by fire the glittering torrents flow;
--Quick whirls the wheel, the ponderous hammer falls,
Loud anvils ring amid the trembling walls,
Strokes follow strokes, the sparkling ingot shines,
190 Flows the red slag, the lengthening bar refines;
Cold waves, immersed, the glowing mass congeal,
And turn to adamant the hissing Steel.


[_Hence dusky Iron_. l. 183. The production of iron from the
decomposition of vegetable bodies is perpetually presented to our view;
the waters oozing from all morasses are chalybeate, and deposit their
ochre on being exposed to the air, the iron acquiring a calciform state
from its union with oxygene or vital air. Where thin morasses lie on
beds of gravel the latter are generally stained by the filtration of
some of the chalybeate water through them. This formation of iron from
vegetable recrements is further evinced by the fern leaves and other
parts of vegetables, so frequently found in the centre of the knobs or
nodules of some iron-ores.

In some of these nodules there is a nucleus of whiter iron-earth
surrounded by many concentric strata of darker and lighter iron-earth
alternately. In one, which now lies before me, the nucleus is a prism of
a triangular form with blunted angles, and about half an inch high, and
an inch and half broad; on every side of this are concentric strata of
similar iron-earth alternately browner and less brown; each stratum is