Mr. Anstice was a young man, not more than twenty-one, when he succeeded to the management of these works, and although he possessed little practical knowledge gained in connection with this branch of industry, he possessed a mind well stored with knowledge. He was a fair amateur chemist of the school of Dr. Black and his contemporaries, under whom Mr. Reynolds had previously studied, and the friend of the tale Sir Humphrey Davy, then a young man, with whom he spent some time with Dr. Beddows, at one time of Shifnal, but then of Bristol, assisting him in a course of experiments he was conducting on pneumatic chemistry and galvanism. He was also a fair amateur geologist, and his early studies led him, on succeeding to the management of the works, to observe, and to apply his knowledge to account. The old hearths and “bears,” as accumulations in the blast-furnaces were called, on occasions of renewal, were carefully scrutinized and searched by him for metallic substances and salts not usually known to exist in iron-ores; and we remember him giving us some remarkably fine cubes of titanium, taken from one he had had blown to pieces. He inherited the very fine collection of fossils Mr. Reynolds had collected, and added thereto by encouraging his men to bring anything they found of a rare character in the clay ironstones. Sir R. Murchison, Mr. Buckland, and Mr. Prestwich occasionally came down to Madeley Wood Hall to study this collection, and derived much information. Mr. Buckland pronounced them at that time the finest collection of fossils of the coal-measures in the kingdom, and nearly the whole of the figures found in Mr. Prestwich’s paper, prepared with great care and research, on the coalfield, were from specimens in this collection. In consequence of the mines being exhausted on the Madeley Wood side of the field he had new shafts sunk to the east, the first of importance being the Hills Lane pits. The Halesfield pair of pits followed, and the mines having been thus proved on that side, the idea first suggested by William Reynolds, of removing the works to that place, was acted upon by Mr. William Anstice, who built his first furnace at Blisser’s Hill, in 1832. A second was built in 1840 and a third in 1844.