_Wrought Iron_—Slag. Little or no Carbon. Very Malleable without Annealing. _Mild Steel_—Very Low Carbon. No Slag. Very Malleable without Annealing. _Carbon Tool Steel_—Medium Carbon. No Slag. Of Medium Malleability. So steel which is not called “iron” at all is a very pure metal in comparison with gray and malleable cast iron and usually has a larger percentage of the chemical element, iron from which all are derived, than has the well-known wrought iron itself. CHAPTER VI WROUGHT IRON We of America, and especially of the West, never have been particularly devoted to the study of our genealogies. However, it is likely that most of us at one time or other in our mind’s eye have seen that little country town back in Massachusetts or New York State, whence came our forebears. Since those days of long ago, when, with you upon his knee, grandfather waxed reminiscent and related tales of his boyhood, haven’t you many times wished that Father Time could carry you back with him a hundred and fifty years and allow you for a few hours to walk among those good people with their quaint dress and customs? How interested you would be in the relatives and friends whose queerly transcribed verses, bearing date of a century and a half ago, adorn the yellow pages of your great aunt’s autograph album, which is one of your treasures! To the present rather unsentimental world we admit of much the same sort of reverent feeling as we traverse the paths, centuries old, of the wrought iron region. Here is something which links us with the antiquities and we “take off our hats and tread lightly” over the lands and the centuries in and through which this primal material, wrought iron, has been produced. But we come back to a plain statement of the case. Let not the fact be overlooked that it is wrought iron which in some form or other has been made during the forty or more centuries that iron has been known. It undoubtedly was the pioneer of the iron family and through all of the centuries it has maintained its importance. From it as a base during the earlier centuries were made the steels for which the ancients were so famous, and similar practice has prevailed from those early times up to the present day. [Illustration: WROUGHT IRON BAR Steel has no “fiber” and can not be split in this way. ] We say that the iron made by the ancients was in reality a variety of what we now term wrought iron, for it fulfilled three of the principal requirements for wrought iron, viz., it was not necessarily melted during production, it was a malleable metal, and it contained cinder or slag, but practically no carbon.