It is true that several workmen paid with their lives for the carelessness engendered by these dangerous occupations; but such deplorable misfortunes cannot be avoided, and these are details that Americans pay very little attention to.  They are more occupied with humanity in general than with individuals in particular.  However, Barbicane professed the contrary principles, and applied them upon every occasion.  Thanks to his care, to his intelligence and respectful intervention in difficult cases, to his prodigious and humane wisdom, the average of catastrophes did not exceed that of cities on the other side of the Atlantic, amongst others those of France, where they count about one accident upon every 200,000 francs of work.

CHAPTER XV.

THE CEREMONY OF THE CASTING.

During the eight months that were employed in the operation of boring the preparatory works of the casting had been conducted simultaneously with extreme rapidity; a stranger arriving at Stony Hill would have been much surprised at what he saw there.

Six hundred yards from the well, and standing in a circle round it as a central point, were 1,200 furnaces, each six feet wide and three yards apart.  The line made by these 1,200 furnaces was two miles long.  They were all built on the same model, with high quadrangular chimneys, and had a singular effect.  J.T.  Maston thought the architectural arrangement superb.  It reminded him of the monuments at Washington.  He thought there was nothing finer in the world, not even in Greece, where he acknowledged never to have been.

It will be remembered that at their third meeting the committee decided to use cast-iron for the Columbiad, and in particular the grey description.  This metal is, in fact, the most tenacious, ductile, and malleable, suitable for all moulding operations, and when smelted with pit coal it is of superior quality for engine-cylinders, hydraulic presses, &c.

But cast-iron, if it has undergone a single fusion, is rarely homogeneous enough; and it is by means of a second fusion that it is purified, refined, and dispossessed of its last earthly deposits.

Before being forwarded to Tampa Town, the iron ore, smelted in the great furnaces of Goldspring, and put in contact with coal and silicium heated to a high temperature, was transformed into cast-iron.  After this first operation the metal was taken to Stony Hill.  But there were 136 millions of pounds of cast-iron, a bulk too expensive to be sent by railway; the price of transport would have doubled that of the raw material.  It appeared preferable to freight vessels at New York and to load them with the iron in bars; no less than sixty-eight vessels of 1,000 tons were required, quite a fleet, which on May 3rd left New York, took the Ocean route, coasted the American shores, entered the Bahama Channel, doubled the point of Florida, and on the 10th of the same month entered the Bay of Espiritu-Santo and anchored safely in the port of Tampa Town.  There the vessels were unloaded and their cargo carried by railway to Stony Hill, and about the middle of January the enormous mass of metal was delivered at its destination.