TORBANEHILL MINERAL AND OF VARIOUS KINDS OF COAL. 181 
This result, as well as the confusion occasioned by the examination of the wit- 
nesses, is evident from the observations made by the learned Judge to the jury, 
from which I shall take the liberty of quoting :— 
“One general remark may be made on the microscopic testimony, and it is, 
that there are those who see a thing, and also those who do not see it,—those 
who do see it, cannot see # unless it is there, and those who cannot see it do not 
see it at all. But very skilful persons looking for a thing and not seeing it, creates 
a strong presumption that it is not there. But when other persons do find it, it 
goes far to displace the notion that it isnot there. But there is another observa- 
tion on the microscopic evidence that occurred tome. Ido not know whether 
I am under any misapprehension, but I think that three, certainly two, of those 
examined by the defenders are botanists also; and I do not think that any of those 
examined for the pursuer, three of them from London, represented themselves as 
botanists. Now the defenders’ witnesses are accustomed to look for plants, and 
can understand them when they see them. The gentlemen on the other side, 
again, looking for woody fibre or tissue, are not, as I understand, conversant or 
skilful in fossil plants.” * 
Now, so far from the botanists seeing what the histologists did not see, it is 
nowhere made to appear in their evidence that they ever observed those rings on 
a transverse section, which I have endeavoured to show are distinctive of true 
coal. On the contrary, they contended that coal and the Torbanehill mineral were 
‘similar in structure, the elements of the one existing in the other, both contain- 
ing vegetable cells; that the numerous yellow clear masses observed in the latter 
were in point of fact such cells, and constituted the proof of vegetable organi- 
zation. 
I think it of great importance to rescue the mode of investigation by means of 
the microscope from all reproach in this case, and to point out that the discrepancy 
_ which existed is not one of fact, but one of inference. I hope then it will be evi- 
dent that the true scientific controversy is altogether connected with the question 
of whether these yellow masses, which both parties saw, described, and figured, 
are or are not vegetable cells. 
Now the view taken up by myself from the first, and which was also taken 
up by Dr Apams and Mr QuEKert, independently of each other, was that they 
are not cells, but masses of a concrete bituminoid or resinoid substance, imbed- 
ded in earthy matter. We could nowhere discover in them any trace of cell wall 
or contents. Their mode of fracture was more crystalline in its character than 
anything else; they occurred confusedly together, and nowhere presented that de- 
finite arrangement to one another, or to ducts and woody tissue, which exists in 
plants. Numbers of them present no envelope or definite boundary, but are scat- 
* Mr Lyett’s Report, pp. 238-9. 
VOL. XXI. PART I. 3 
