Africa, when its most barbarous tribes were first discovered, was making various useful articles of iron. Its earliest modes of manufacture were doubtless still followed when Dr. Livingstone explored the interior, as they now also are. He thus describes their furnaces and iron: “At every third or fourth village (in the regions near Lake Nyassa) we saw a kiln-looking structure, about 6 feet high and 2½ feet in diameter. It is a clay fire-hardened furnace for smelting iron. No flux is used, whether with specular iron, the yellow hematite, or magnetic ore, and yet capital metal is produced. Native manufactured iron is so good that the natives declare English iron “rotten” in comparison, and specimens of African hoes were pronounced at Birmingham nearly equal to the best Swedish iron.” The natives of India, the Hottentots, the early Britons, the Chinese, the savages of North and South America, as discovery or research brought their labours to light, or uncovered the monuments of their earliest life, were shown to be acquainted with similar simple forms of smelting furnaces. Early Spain produced a furnace which was adopted by the whole of Europe as fast as it became known. It was the Catalan furnace, so named from the province of Catalonia, where it probably first originated, and it is still so known and extensively used. “It consists of a four-sided cavity or hearth, which is always placed within a building and separated from the main wall thereof by a thinner interior wall, which in part constitutes one side of the furnace. The blast pipe comes through the wall, and enters the fire through a flue which slants downward. The bottom is formed of a refractory stone, which is renewable. The furnace has no chimneys. The blast is produced by means of a fall of water usually from 22 to 27 feet high, through a rectangular tube, into a rectangular cistern below, to whose upper part the blast pipe is connected, the water escaping through a pipe below. This apparatus is exterior to the building, and is said to afford a continuous blast of great regularity; the air, when it passes into the furnace, is, however, saturated with moisture.”--_Knight._ No doubt in such a heat was formed the metal from which was shaped the armour of Don Quixote and his prototypes. Bell in his history of Metallurgy tells us that the manufacture of malleable iron must have fallen into decadence in England, especially before the reign of Elizabeth and Charles I., as no furnaces equal even to the Catalan had for a long time been in use; and the architectural iron column found in ancient Delhi, 16 inches in diameter, about 48 feet long and calculated to weigh about 17 tons, could not have been formed by any means known in England in the sixteenth century. This decadence was in part due to the severe laws enacted against the destruction of forests, and most of the iron was then brought to England from Germany and other countries.