Yet, like every other invention, this of Mr. Bessemer had long been dreamt of, if not really made. We are informed in Warner's Tour through the Northern. Counties of England, published at Bath in 1801, that a Mr. Reed of Whitehaven had succeeded at that early period in making steel direct from the ore; and Mr. Mushet clearly alludes to the process in his "Papers on Iron and Steel." Nevertheless, Mr. Bessemer is entitled to the merit of working out the idea, and bringing the process to perfection, by his great skill and indomitable perseverance. In the Heath process, carburet of manganese is employed to aid the conversion of iron into steel, while it also confers on the metal the property of welding and working more soundly under the hammer--a fact discovered by Mr. Heath while residing in India. Mr. Mushet's process is of a similar character. Another inventor, Major Uchatius, an Austrian engineer, granulates crude iron while in a molten state by pouring it into water, and then subjecting it to the process of conversion. Some of the manufacturers still affect secrecy in their operations; but as one of the Sanderson firm--famous for the excellence of their steel--remarked to a visitor when showing him over their works, "the great secret is to have the courage to be honest--a spirit to purchase the best material, and the means and disposition to do justice to it in the manufacture." It remains to be added, that much of the success of the Sheffield manufactures is attributable to the practical skill of the workmen, who have profited by the accumulated experience treasured up by their class through many generations. The results of the innumerable experiments conducted before their eyes have issued in a most valuable though unwritten code of practice, the details of which are known only to themselves. They are also a most laborious class; and Le Play says of them, when alluding to the fact of a single workman superintending the operations of three steel-casting furnaces--"I have found nowhere in Europe, except in England, workmen able for an entire day, without any interval of rest, to undergo such toilsome and exhausting labour as that performed by these Sheffield workmen." [1] AGRICOLA, De Re Metallica. Basle, 1621. [2] The Rev. JOSEPH HUNTER, History of Hallamshire. [3] MUSHET, Papers On Iron and Steel. [4] M. Le Play's two elaborate and admirable reports on the manufacture of steel, published in the Annales des Mines, vols. iii. and ix., 4th series, are unique of their kind, and have as yet no counterpart in English literature. They are respectively entitled 'Memoire sur la Fabrication de l'Acier en Yorkshire,' and 'Memoire sur le Fabrication et le Commerce des Fers a Acier dans le Nord de l'Europe.'