The great iron-working age of India seems to have been in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, when the blacksmiths must have been skilful and commanded an unlimited supply of the best metal. The Lát or iron-pillar of Delhi, to mention no other, is a solid shaft, showing that the people were unable to make a core. This simple piece of wrought metal, calculated to weigh seventeen tons and to contain eighty cubic feet of metal, measures in diameter 16·4 inches tapering to 12·05. The height above ground is twenty-two feet, and excavations of twenty-six feet did not reach the base: the known length therefore is upwards of forty-eight feet.[374] The sundry inscriptions punched upon it are of very various dates: Prinsep[375] assigns our third or fourth century to the Nagari character in which Rajah Dhava thus ‘renowned it’:— ‘By him who, learning the warlike preparations and entrenchments of his enemies with their good soldiers and allies, a monument of fame engraved by his Sword on their limbs, who as master of the seven advantages,[376] crossing over (the Indus?), so subdued the Vahlikas of Sindhu [N.B.: they can hardly be the ‘people of Balkh’] that even at this day his disciplined force and defences on the south (of the river) are sacredly respected by them,’ &c. &c. Metallurgists dispute as to the way in which this huge iron rod was wrought. One writer,[377] however, seems to have hit upon the solution of the problem: ‘The column may have been forged standing, by welding on, one over another, thin iron plates or dires, the fire being built round the column as it grew; and the ground raised in a mound to keep the top of the column on a level with the workplace.’ Pyramid-building has been explained in the same way—a causeway. But the Lát is not the only marvel of Hindu metallurgy. Mr. James Fergusson found in the Temple of Kanaruc, or Black Pagoda of the Madras Presidency, beams of wrought iron about twenty-one feet in length and eight inches section, to strengthen the roof, which the Hindus, in their distrust of the arch, formed after their usual bracket-fashion. In the fane of Mahavellipore he discovered sockets for similar supports. He assigns to the Black Pagoda a date between A.D. 1236 and 1241; and to Mahavellipore any time between our tenth and fourteenth centuries.[378] Colonel Pearse, R.A. presented to the trustees of the British Museum a unique collection of archaic tools, iron and steel, gouges, spatulæ, ladles, and similar articles, dug out of tumuli at Wari Gaon, near Kampti. But there are no grounds whatever for dating them ‘about B.C. 1500, or the time of Moses.’ [Heading: _WOOTZ._] The _ferrum Indicum_[379] of the Classics may still be represented by the famous Wootz or Wutz,[380] the ‘natural Indian steel,’ still so much prized for Sword-blades in Persia and Afghanistan. The specimens first sent in 1795 to the Royal Society of London were analysed by Mr. Josiah M. Heath with the results given below.[381]