The vanity of possessing something that is singularly curious, the false idea that whatever is expensive must necessarily be good, and sometimes, though rarely, the laudable desire of improvement, have all in their turns been the causes of a variety of experiments made in the manufacture of barrels. An artist in London, who wrought a great deal of Spanish iron, forged barrels from old scythes, from wire, from needles, and a great many other articles suggested by the whim of the customers—who made barrels with a lining of steel, and formed others with a double spiral of steel and iron alternately—confessed after these numerous trials, that “stub iron wrought into a twisted barrel is superior to every other.” Whenever steel was employed, he found that the barrel neither welded nor bored so perfectly as when iron alone was used. * * * * * The _English stub barrels_ are deservedly celebrated for their superior elegance and strength, as well as for the accuracy with which they throw their ball or shot. The iron employed in them is formed of stubs, which are old horse-shoe nails, procured from country farriers, and from poor people who gain a subsistence by picking them up on the great roads leading to the metropolis. These are originally formed from the softest, toughest iron that can be had, and this is still farther purified by the numerous heatings and hammerings it has undergone in being reduced from a bar into the size and form of nails. They cost about ten shillings the hundred weight, and twenty-eight pounds are required to make a single barrel of the ordinary size. A hoop of iron about an inch broad, or six or seven inches diameter, is placed perpendicularly, and the stubs, previously freed from dirt by washing, are neatly piled in it, with their heads outermost on each side, until the hoop is quite filled and wedged tight with them, the whole resembling a rough circular cake of iron. This is put into the fire, until it has acquired a white heat, when it is hammered either by the strength of the arm, or by the force of machinery, until it coalesces, and becomes one solid mass of iron. The hoop is then removed, and the heatings and hammerings repeated, until the iron, by being thus wrought and kneaded, is freed from every impurity, and rendered very tough and close in the grain. The workmen then proceeds to draw it out into pieces of about twenty-four inches in length, half an inch or more in breadth, and half an inch in thickness. * * * * *