Note 39 — Chapter III · - RATIO OF HUMAN PROGRESS.

M. Quiquerez, a Swiss engineer, discovered in the canton of Berne the remains of a number of side-hill furnaces for smelting iron ore; together with tools, fragments of iron and charcoal. To construct one, an excavation was made in the side of a hill in which a bosh was formed of clay, with a chimney in the form of a dome above it to create a draft. No evidence was found of the use of the bellows. The boshes seem to have been charged with alternate layers of pulverized ore and charcoal, combustion being sustained by fanning the flames. The result was a spongy mass of partly fused ore which was afterwards welded into a compact mass by hammering. A deposit of charcoal was found beneath a bed of peat twenty feet in thickness. It is not probable that these furnaces were coeval with the knowledge of smelting iron ore; but they were, not unlikely, close copies of the original furnace.—Vide Figuier’s Primitive Man, Putnam’s ed., p. 301.