iron (metal)

58:7.6This stone layer, the old­est fos­sil-bear­ing stra­tum in the crust of the earth, has been crum­pled, folded, and grotesquely twisted as a re­sult of the up­heavals of earth­quakes and the early vol­ca­noes. The lava flows of this age brought much iron, cop­per, and lead up near the plan­e­tary sur­face.

58:7.10Some of the up­per lay­ers of these tran­si­tion rock de­posits con­tain small amounts of shale or slate of dark col­ors, in­di­cat­ing the pres­ence of or­ganic car­bon and tes­ti­fy­ing to the ex­is­tence of the an­ces­tors of those forms of plant life which over­ran the earth dur­ing the suc­ceed­ing Car­bonif­er­ous or coal age. Much of the cop­per in these rock lay­ers re­sults from wa­ter de­po­si­tion. Some is found in the cracks of the older rocks and is the con­cen­trate of the slug­gish swamp wa­ter of some an­cient shel­tered shore line. The iron mines of North Amer­ica and Eu­rope are lo­cated in de­posits and ex­tru­sions ly­ing partly in the older un­strat­i­fied rocks and partly in these later strat­i­fied rocks of the tran­si­tion pe­ri­ods of life for­ma­tion.

69:6.4Though An­don, the dis­cov­erer of fire, avoided treat­ing it as an ob­ject of wor­ship, many of his de­scen­dants re­garded the flame as a fe­tish or as a spirit. They failed to reap the san­i­tary ben­e­fits of fire be­cause they would not burn refuse. Prim­i­tive man feared fire and al­ways sought to keep it in good hu­mor, hence the sprin­kling of in­cense. Un­der no cir­cum­stances would the an­cients spit in a fire, nor would they ever pass be­tween any­one and a burn­ing fire. Even the iron pyrites and flints used in strik­ing fire were held sa­cred by early man­kind.

80:6.3When the last ex­o­dus from the Eu­phrates val­ley oc­curred, Egypt was for­tu­nate in gain­ing so many of the most skill­ful artists and ar­ti­sans. These And­ite ar­ti­sans found them­selves quite at home in that they were thor­oughly fa­mil­iar with river life, its floods, ir­ri­ga­tions, and dry sea­sons. They en­joyed the shel­tered po­si­tion of the Nile val­ley; they were there much less sub­ject to hos­tile raids and at­tacks than along the Eu­phrates. And they added greatly to the met­al­work­ing skill of the Egyp­tians. Here they worked iron ores com­ing from Mount Sinai in­stead of from the Black Sea re­gions.

65:6.4One of the most ser­vice­able and com­plex episodes in the evo­lu­tion of the higher types of an­i­mals con­sisted in the de­vel­op­ment of the abil­ity of the iron in the cir­cu­lat­ing blood cells to per­form in the dou­ble role of oxy­gen car­rier and car­bon diox­ide re­mover. And this per­for­mance of the red blood cells il­lus­trates how evolv­ing or­gan­isms are able to adapt their func­tions to vary­ing or chang­ing en­vi­ron­ment. The higher an­i­mals, in­clud­ing man, oxy­genate their tis­sues by the ac­tion of the iron of the red blood cells, which car­ries oxy­gen to the liv­ing cells and just as ef­fi­ciently re­moves the car­bon diox­ide. But other met­als can be made to serve the same pur­pose. The cut­tle­fish em­ploys cop­per for this func­tion, and the sea squirt uti­lizes vana­dium.

57:7.1Through­out these early times the space re­gions of the so­lar sys­tem were swarm­ing with small dis­rup­tive and con­den­sa­tion bod­ies, and in the ab­sence of a pro­tec­tive com­bus­tion at­mo­sphere such space bod­ies crashed di­rectly on the sur­face of Uran­tia. These in­ces­sant im­pacts kept the sur­face of the planet more or less heated, and this, to­gether with the in­creased ac­tion of grav­ity as the sphere grew larger, be­gan to set in op­er­a­tion those in­flu­ences which grad­u­ally caused the heav­ier el­e­ments, such as iron, to set­tle more and more to­ward the cen­ter of the planet.

57:8.16850,000,000 years ago the first real epoch of the sta­bi­liza­tion of the earth’s crust be­gan. Most of the heav­ier met­als had set­tled down to­ward the cen­ter of the globe; the cool­ing crust had ceased to cave in on such an ex­ten­sive scale as in for­mer ages. There was es­tab­lished a bet­ter bal­ance be­tween the land ex­tru­sion and the heav­ier ocean bed. The flow of the sub­crustal lava bed be­came well-nigh world-wide, and this com­pen­sated and sta­bi­lized the fluc­tu­a­tions due to cool­ing, con­tract­ing, and su­per­fi­cial shift­ing.

41:4.3Cool­ing stars can be phys­i­cally gaseous and tremen­dously dense at the same time. You are not fa­mil­iar with the so­lar super­gases, but these and other un­usual forms of mat­ter ex­plain how even non­solid suns can at­tain a den­sity equal to iron—about the same as Uran­tia—and yet be in a highly heated gaseous state and con­tinue to func­tion as suns. The atoms in these dense super­gases are ex­cep­tion­ally small; they con­tain few elec­trons. Such suns have also largely lost their free ul­ti­ma­tonic stores of en­ergy.