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Then the purified metal passes into other cauldrons, which are borne along by hydraulic machinery and their contents gently tipped into the crucibles, which lower their gaping mouths to receive the daffodil stream of molten iron. When their maws are full, the crucibles are once more brought into an erect position, and the process of converting iron into steel begins.
A strange scene, like an alchemist's den, the light of falling day reflected from test tubes and crucibles, revealing in dark corners uncouth appliances, queer diagrams, strange odours. Upon the floor the inert figure of the foremost of New York's chemists; above his prostrate form, wild-eyed with horror at seeing his dramatic death, a beautiful woman, the most beautiful in the world.
From the number of these wrecks of early experiments, it is clear that he had worked continuously upon his grand idea of purifying the raw steel then in use, by melting it with fluxes at an intense heat in closed earthen crucibles.
The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and feverish worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the quantities of soot clustered above it seemed to have been burning for ages. There was a distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the room were retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of chemical research.
We may pass here and there by diligent search from conjecture to assurance; analyse a pigment, an alloy or a slag; discover from an older record than the Greeks', the chemical prescription wherewith an Egyptian princess darkened her eyes, or study the pictured hearth, bellows, oven, crucibles with which the followers of Tubal-Cain smelted their ore.
Thus persecuted by his enemies, Tycho resolved to remain no longer in an ungrateful country. He carried from Huen every thing that was moveable, and having packed up his instruments, his crucibles, and his books, he hired a ship to convey them to some foreign land.
To-day the vast plant which once produced the most exquisite and delicate ware in the world is now producing the less lovely but more serviceable crucibles, condensers and retorts necessary for the distillation of the powerful acid used in modern high explosives. Previous to the war, the Central Empire had a monopoly on this market.
Already, in idea, the possessor of countless millions, he was not to be cast down for fear of present expenses. He thus continued from day to day, and from month to month, till he was, at last, obliged to sell a portion of his deeply-mortgaged estates, to find aliment for the hungry crucibles of Dee and Kelly, and the no less hungry stomachs of their wives and families.
Pere Alexis in the midst of all the strange laboratory instruments seemed Satan himself, and he repulsed the kindly arms stretched forth to sustain him; in the gloom, where danced here and there the little blue flames from the crucibles, lively as flickering tongues, he believed he saw Michael Nikolaievitch's ghost come to cry, "The arsenate of soda continues, and I am dead."
Both of these illustrations show how the physicist and chemist, when adequately armed for astronomical attack, can take advantage in their studies of the stupendous processes visible in cosmic crucibles, heated to high temperatures and influenced, as in the case of sun-spots, by intense magnetic fields.
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