During the march they saw some wild boars, but they did not attempt to attack the little troupe, and it seemed that they were not going to have any encounter with savage beasts, when the reporter saw in a dense thicket, among the lower branches of a tree, an animal which he took to be a bear, and which he began tranquilly to sketch. Fortunately for Spilett, the animal in question did not belong to that redoubtable family of plantigrades. It was an ai, better known as a sloth, which has a body like that of a large dog, a rough and dirty-colored skin, the feet armed with strong claws which enable it to grasp the branches of trees and feed upon the leaves. Having identified the animal without disturbing it, Spilett struck out “bear” and wrote “ai” under his drawing and the route was resumed. At 5 o’clock Smith called a halt. They were past the forest and at the beginning of the massive spurs which buttressed Mount Franklin towards the east. A few hundred paces distant was Red Creek; so drinking water was not wanting. The camp was made. In less than an hour a hut, constructed from the branches of the tropical bindweed, and stopped with loam, was erected under the trees on the edge of the forest. They deferred the geological work until the next day. Supper was prepared, a good fire blazed before the hut, the spit turned, and at 8 o’clock, while one of the party kept the fire going, in case some dangerous beast should prowl around, the others slept soundly. The next morning, Smith, accompanied by Herbert, went to look for the place where they had found the specimen of ore. They found the deposit on the surface, near the sources of the creek, close to the base of one of the northeast buttresses. This mineral, very rich in iron, enclosed in its fusible vein-stone, was perfectly suited to the method of reduction which the engineer intended to employ, which was the simplified Catalonian process practised in Corsica. This method properly required the construction of ovens and crucibles in which the ore and the coal, placed in alternate layers, were transformed and reduced. But Smith proposed to simplify matters by simply making a huge cube of coal and ore, into the centre of which the air from the bellows would be introduced. This was, probably, what Tubal Cain did. And a process which gave such good results to Adam’s grandson would doubtless succeed with the colonists of Lincoln Island. The coal was collected with the same facility as the ore, and the latter was broken into little pieces and the impurities picked from it. Then the coal and ore were heaped together in successive layers—just as a charcoal-burner arranges his wood. Thus arranged, under the influence of the air from the bellows, the coal would change into carbonic acid, then into oxide of carbon, which would release the oxygen from the oxide of iron.