‘Were the use of iron lost among us,’ says the illustrious Locke, ‘we should, in a few ages, be unavoidably reduced to the wants and ignorance of the ancient savage Americans;’ nor will this view be deemed extravagant if we reflect that, but for iron, man would be _virtually without_ tools, since it is almost the only metal capable of taking a sharp edge and keeping it. The bounty of the Creator, which bestowed on man this inestimable gift, has also provided for its wider diffusion over the earth than is the case with any other of the useful metals. Few mineral substances or stones are without an admixture of it. Sands, clays, the waters of rivers or springs, are scarcely ever perfectly free from iron, while animal and vegetable substances likewise afford it in the residues which they leave after incineration. Its mines may truly be said to be inexhaustible; in some its ores occur in compact masses of extraordinary magnitude, in others they spread in vast strata or extend in veins of a prodigious length. Yet, in spite of its wide diffusion, the extraction of iron from its ores generally requires so much metallurgic skill that its use would probably have remained undiscovered by the ancients if Providence had not in a wonderful manner revealed, as it were, its existence to mankind. All iron of a _terrestrial_ origin is combined with other substances, which conceal its true nature from the uninitiated eye, and from which it is with difficulty separated; but here and there, scattered over the surface of the earth, are found solitary masses of metallic iron, which, having fallen from the skies, may truly be called erratic boulders from another world. The idea of their having dropped from the clouds was long ridiculed by the learned; but their fall has been so often observed, and so circumstantially recorded in the annals of almost every age, that scepticism has been obliged to yield to the weight of accumulated evidence, and science no longer doubts their meteoric origin. Nothing can be more interesting than these mysterious heralds from the distant fields of ether, which, after wandering through space for countless ages, have at length been brought within the sphere of attraction of our planet, and, alighting on its surface, afford us tangible proofs that many of the substances of which our earth is composed—iron, nickel, silex, &c., &c.—exist beyond its limits, and that most probably our whole solar system is constructed of the same materials as our globe. But meteoric iron—which sometimes occurs in enormous masses[56]—is more than a mere object of curiosity, for it has had a most important influence on the progress of the human race. On such a mass undoubtedly the _first smith_ exercised his skill, and it was this which first made mankind acquainted with a metal more valuable than copper or gold. Footnote 56: