giveii on a fate Trial. 347 



should not have been surprised if his description of the oil as 

 " an agent of extreme activity and danger," had proved fatal to 

 the plaintiffs ; at the same time I believe that if he had known 

 the quantity of oil that was put into that vessel, and had been 

 aware of the great expansibility of whale oil, he would have ex- 

 pected just such a result as did actually happen, and would 

 have given a very different testimony in court. 



John George Children, Esq., F.R.S., F.L.S., M.R.I., 

 F.A.S., M.G.S., of the British Museum, was next examined. 

 Tliis gentleman, who had never had an opportunity of seeing a 

 sugar-house, or of making any experiments himself on either 

 oil or sugar, was not likely to throw much new light upon the 

 subject ; but having seen the public experiment in Whitecross- 

 street, he gave an opinion respecting the comparative safety of 

 the two modes of boiling sugar, similar to several of the wit- 

 nesses on the same side of the question. Mr. Children, from 

 his general knowledge of chemistry, was very well qualified for 

 investigating the subject, and it is to be regretted that he did 

 not do so. 



John Taylor, Esq., M.G.S., Chemist and Engineer, was 

 next called upon to give evidence. This gentleman stated, that 

 his first experiments on making gas from oil, were five years 

 ago ; that he had a patent for it ; that he was now a partner in a 

 very large manufactory, and from his experience in oil, he did 

 not think it a very safe article to be used to apply heat to any 

 other substance. He then said a great deal on the habitudes of 

 tar oil, but as this does not appear to me to bear at all upon the 

 question, and as I have extended this paper too much already, 

 I omit the whole of it, together with the reasoning respecting 

 currents in mines. On being asked respecting his experiments 

 with whale-oil, he said there was an inflammable vapour that 

 issued from it at various temperatures from 340° to 390°, but 

 that he left Wilkinson to make a minute of every thing. That 

 he had 400 thermometers made by Pastorelli ; that the one used 

 in the experiment was one of them ; that he had proved some of 



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