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Show THE ALUMINUM AGE. A Metal That Will Supercede Iron. IT IS NOT ONE OF THE LOST 1RTS. How will the Death of Fred J.Seymour Affect it ? Frorn th- tone of tho lament sent up bv the pn-fts throughout the length and breadth of the land, one would suppooO tliat tho cht-ap aluminum problem is, aiiice the death of this one man, as far from being solved as it was in lb'jH, when a very poor quality of that valuable material ma-terial was worth $ti5(J per pound; on this point, however, the people are being misled. 1 do not believe it to be Jthe Intention of the press to bo misleading in this or any other matter, however trivial, but what onu of the numerous croakers who have helped to swell the cry, "Lost, lost!" from shore to shore believes, after a moment's Bober afterthought, that an invention or process necessary to the advancement ad-vancement of mankind could be irretrievably irre-trievably lost by the death of one man? Tho Poiuptiiiuna could cast plaster statues whole and hollow at a single cast; nothing of the kind can bo done in this day and age of tho world. The ancients understood the process of manufacturing malleable glass; cups wero made in those olden times which could be dashed violently to the ground without a fracture; only dents, where, perchance, they came In contact with cobljlo stones or other pebbles; the denta could bo hammered out just for all the world like wo would hammer dents in tinware at tho present day. Malleable glass is another of the lost arts. In tho year 07(1 A. U. the Chinese emperor, Tai Tsung, came into possession of a wonderful painting of an ox, which was visible only during the night at daylight day-light it vanished. It was a specimen of the ancient luminous painting of which not a single example iB now extant. Above I have catalogued three representatives repre-sentatives of the lost arts, arts which are indeed lost; but mind, dear reader, they were not lost by the death of a single in-ji in-ji . i.iudi. ( 'itift were overwhelmed with many feet of plastic, fiery lava; wholo nations wero wiped off the face of the earth by frightful pestilence, and islands and continents sunken beneath the rushing rush-ing waters which closed over them, making the wreck of the nation in which it thrived as complete as the loss of the art itself. With these facts in view it is hardly possible, if tho "Aluminum Age" has really been foreshadowed to tho extent claimed by enthusiastic scientists and inventors, that tho brilliant white metal era will forever recede from our sight. Because one man has lived his allotted days and passed to the great unknown without revealing his process of cheapening cheap-ening a material that will make an age as much in advance of this age of iron as the iron age is in advance of the stone nironrllmt. of nrohistnrlc hrnnzo. there are no reasons for considering tho art lost forever. For the past two or three years many extravagant Btories have been circulated regarding this peerless metal. According to a certain class of writers aluminum, so chenply produced as to bo a dangerous rival of iron and steel, was not only one of the future, near future, possibilities, but to them the era had really dawned. Overzealousness and too much faith in the inventive ingenuity in-genuity of an age which has given to us the telegraph, lhe telephone, the phonograph, phono-graph, the electric motor and hundreds of other useful inventionsand appliances, are the only excuses that can bo offered in extenuation of these egregious epistles. epis-tles. John W. Wright in St. Louis lie-public. |