atural oil. He had previously held the idea that the petroleum might be
produced by the action of heat on the coal and the vapour going up into
the sandstone to be condensed. He made a great many experiments in
retorts, with the view of testing the practicability of this idea, and
the results obtained were very various. He had no fixed data to guide
him, and he sometimes got one thing, sometimes another. At last,
however, success rewarded his labours, and he was entitled to
exclaim--"Eureka!" Out of a cannel that came to be mixed with soda ash
he obtained a quantity of liquid that contained paraffin. In the
beginning of 1850, Mr. Bartholomew, of the City and Suburban Gas Works,
Glasgow, showed Mr. Young some specimens of the Boghead coal, with which
he renewed his experiments, distilling the mineral at a low temperature,
until he evolved a considerable quantity of crude paraffin. Ultimately,
Mr. Young, Mr. Meldrum, and Mr. Binney, to whom the discovery was
imparted at the Edinburgh meeting of the British Association, in 1850,
resolved on erecting works at Bathgate, in the centre of the Torbanehill
coal district, for the manufacture of paraffin. Before setting out on
this venture, however, Mr. Young took care to protect his invention by
securing a patent. In 1851 the Bathgate works, which originally
consisted of only two or three retorts, were set agoing, and from that
time until the present hour their success has been uninterrupted. It is
worth while mentioning that Mr. Young, during the whole course of his
experiments, derived no advice or assistance whatever from the
experience or conclusions of others who had preceded him in the same
phase of chemical science, and that he had never either heard of or seen
Reichenbach's letter to Dumas, upon which the claims of the German
chemist to have been the original discoverer of paraffin were based. It
is now generally admitted that Reichenbach was the real discoverer of
paraffin. He found it as an ingredient in the tar obtained by distilling
beechwood, as far back as 1830. What Reichenbach only dreamed about and
hoped for, however, Mr. Young practically realised; and to our townsman
is due the credit of having been the first to prepare paraffin as a
commercial article from mineral sources.

The exact nature and properties of shale was the subject of a remarkable
trial in the Court of Session soon after Mr. Young began to work the raw
material at Bathgate. The proprietor of the