25 that the Monkland Company used it alone,
without any other mixture than the necessary quantity of limestone for
a flux. "The success of this Company," says Mr. Mushet, "soon gave
rise to the Gartsherrie and Dundyvan furnaces, in the midst of which
progress came the use of raw pit-coal and the Hot Blast--the latter one
of the greatest discoveries in metallurgy of the present age, and,
above every other process, admirably adapted for smelting the Blackband
ironstone." From the introduction of this process the extraordinary
development of the iron-manufacture of Scotland may be said to date;
and we accordingly propose to devote the present chapter to an account
of its meritorious inventor.

James Beaumont Neilson was born at Shettleston, a roadside village
about three miles eastward of Glasgow, on the 22nd of June, 1792. His
parents belonged to the working class. His father's earnings during
many laborious years of his life did not exceed sixteen shillings a
week. He had been bred to the trade of a mill-wright, and was for some
time in the employment of Dr. Roebuck as an engine-wright at his
colliery near Boroughstoness. He was next employed in a like capacity
by Mr. Beaumont, the mineral-manager of the collieries of Mrs.
Cunningham of Lainshaw, near Irvine in Ayrshire; after which he was
appointed engine-wright at Ayr, and subsequently at the Govan Coal
Works near Glasgow, where he remained until his death. It was while
working at the Irvine Works that he first became acquainted with his
future wife, Marion Smith, the daughter of a Renfrewshire bleacher, a
woman remarkable through life for her clever, managing, and industrious
habits. She had the charge of Mrs. Cunningham's children for some time
after the marriage of that lady to Mr. Beaumont, and it was in
compliment to her former mistress and her husband that she named her
youngest son James Beaumont after the latter.

The boy's education was confined to the common elements of reading,
writing, and arithmetic, which he partly acquired at the parish school
of Strathbungo near Glasgow, and partly at the Chapel School, as it was
called, in the Gorbals at Glasgow. He had finally left school before
he was fourteen. Some time before he left, he had been partially set
to work, and earned four shillings a week by employing a part of each
day in driving a small condensing engine which his father had put up in
a neighbouring quarry. After leaving school, he was em