cast-iron ordnance was manufactured at Buxted.  Two specialities in the iron trade belonged to Sussex, the manufacture of chimney-backs, and cast-iron plates for grave-stones.  At the time when wood constituted the fuel the backs of fire-places were frequently ornamented with neat designs.  Specimens, both of the chimney-backs and of the monuments, are occasionally met with.  These articles were exported from Rye.  The iron manufacture, of course, met with considerable discouragement on the discovery of smelting with pit-coal, and the rapid progress of iron works in Staffordshire and the North, but it lingered on until the great forest was cut down and the fuel exhausted.”

In his interesting work, “Sylvia,” published in 1661, Evelyn, in speaking of the noxious vapours poured out into the air by the increasing number of coal fires, writes, “This is that pernicious smoke which sullies all her glory, superinducing a sooty crust or furr upon all that it lights, spoiling movables, tarnishing the plate, gildings and furniture, and corroding the very iron bars and hardest stones with those piercing and acrimonious spirits which accompany its sulphur, and executing more in one year than the pure air of the country could effect in some hundreds.”  The evils here mentioned are those which have grown and have become intensified a hundred-fold during the two centuries and a half which have since elapsed.  When the many efforts which were made to limit its use in the years prior to 1600 are remembered; at which time, we are informed, two ships only were engaged in bringing coal to London, it at once appears how paltry are the efforts made now to moderate these same baneful influences on our atmosphere, at a time when the annual consumption of coal in the United Kingdom has reached the enormous total of 190 millions of tons.  The various smoke-abatement associations which have started into existence during the last few years are doing a little, although very little, towards directing popular attention to the subject; but there is an enormous task before them, that of awakening every individual to an appreciation of the personal interest which he has in their success, and to realise how much might at once be done if each were to do his share, minute though it might be, towards mitigating the evils of the present mode of coal-consumption.  Probably very few householders ever realise what important factories their chimneys constitute, in bringing about air pollution, and the more they do away with the use of bituminous coal for fuel, the nearer we shall be to the time when yellow fog will be a thing of the past.