cing
industry. This was due to the exhaustion of the woods and forests that
provided fuel, or to their retention for the future needs of
ship-building and for pleasure parks. In 1760, however, Mr. Roebuck
introduced at the Carron iron-works a new kind of blast furnace by
which iron ore could be smelted with coal as fuel. In 1790 the
steam-engine was introduced to cause the blast. Production had already
begun to advance before the latter date, and it now increased by
thousands of tons a year till far into the present century.
Improvements were introduced in puddling, rolling, and other processes
of the manufacture of iron at about the same time. The production of
coal increased more than proportionately. New devices in mining were
introduced, such as steam pumps, the custom of supporting the roofs
of the veins with timber instead of pillars of coal, and Sir Humphry
Davy's safety lamp of 1815. The smelting of iron and the use of the
steam-engine made such a demand for coal that capital was applied in
large quantities to its production, and more than ten million tons a
year were mined before the century closed.

[Illustration: "The Rocket" Locomotive, 1825. (Smiles: _Life of George
Stephenson_.)]

Some slight improvements in roads and canals had been made and others
projected during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; but
in the last quarter of the century the work of Telford, Macadam, and
other engineers, and of the private turnpike companies or public
authorities who engaged them, covered England with good roads. The
first canal was that from Worsley to Manchester, built by Brindley
for the duke of Bridgewater in 1761. Within a few years a system of
canals had been constructed which gave ready transportation for goods
through all parts of the country. The continuance of this development
of transportation and its fundamental modification by the introduction
of railways and steamboats has been one of the most striking
characteristics of the nineteenth century.

*59. The Revival of Enclosures.*--The changes which the latter half of
the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth brought
were as profound in the occupation and use of the land as they were in
the production and transportation of manufactured goods. An
agricultural revolution was in progress as truly as was the
industrial.

The improvements in the methods of farming already referred to as
showing themselves earlier in the century