Of the sowing of St. Lusson at the "Soo" and La Salle at New Orleans we have spoken. Long later (1749), the first of whom we have record after La Salle, another French sower went forth to sow along the rivers close to the foot of the Alleghany Mountains--Céloron de Bienville, Chevalier de St. Louis. It is of his sowing that the main cities have sprung, for he planted a plate of "repossession" at the entrance of every important branch of the Ohio and fastened upon trees sheets of "white iron" bearing the arms of France. Chief among them is Pittsburgh, which stands on the carboniferous site of Fort Duquesne like the prow of a vessel headed westward, a place which Céloron is believed to have had in mind when he wrote in his journal, "the finest place on La Belle Rivière"--what was then a wedge of wild black land lodged between two converging streams that drained all the slope of the northern Alleghanies being now the foundation of the world's capital of a sterner metal than lead--scarred with fires and smothered with smoke from many furnaces, two of which alone, it has been estimated by some one, have poured forth enough molten iron in the last thirty years to cover with steel plates an inch thick a road fifty feet wide stretching from the Alleghany edge of the valley not merely to the mouth of the Ohio but on to the other mountain border, where all dreams of a way to the western sea were ended. And this highway of plates across the empire of New France gives but suggestion of the meagerest fraction of the fruitage of the planting of the leaden plates or the grafting of the arms of France upon the trees along the Ohio--forty pounds of iron, it has been estimated by one graphic statistician, for every man, woman, and child on the globe to-day, [Footnote: H. N. Casson. United States produces thirty million tons annually, Pennsylvania eleven and a quarter million. "Mineral Resources," 1912.] and I do not know how much tin. And, in a sense, all from a small box or crate of plates made of lead--six, eight, or more in number, eleven inches long, seven inches wide, and one eighth of an inch thick, and engraved with an inscription--one of which was found not long ago, by some lads, protruding from the bank of one of the tributary rivers! The inscription ran (in translation):