370 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



ferable to coal, for the distillation of paraffin. Mr. Gillespie con- 

 sidered naturally enough that having let the land with the right to 

 dig for coals, the extracting of another mineral for the purpose of 

 making a mineral oil was the taking away of a property belonging 

 to him ; while, on the other hand, the Russells, knowing the value of 

 the substance, and the large revenue it was producing, claimed a 

 right to it as being a kind of coal. Thus ten thousand pounds and 

 a great revenue rested on the answer to the simple question, What 

 is Coal ? This was the question the " bigwigs" were called upon to 

 answer, and on the whole a pretty mess they made of the attempt. 

 It may seem an easy question to answer, and it may seem an easy 

 thing to call things by their right names. We know, however, it is 

 a very easy thing to call things by wrong names, and so many things 

 have been called coal wrongly, that it is not surprising that the " big- 

 wigs" were at sixes and sevens in their replies, and that the jury 

 founded their verdict on a reason totally irrelevant to the case. As 

 the "bigwigs" could not agree as to what coal was, the jurymen 

 went on the broad principle that everything black that would burn 

 was coal, and decided that as the Torbane hill substance was black, 

 and had been sold in the market as Cannel coal, that therefore it 

 must be coal. They found for the defendants accordingly. But the 

 Russels and the Grillespies could not agree even after this lucid deci- 

 sion, the one calling it coal, the other persisting that it was not, and 

 so,, after several years, they concurred at last on one point — the only 

 one, we believe, they ever have concurred in — that thenceforth it 

 should be called " The Torbane-hill Mineral." 



Our friend Mr. Salter seems to call it coal still. We do not. And 

 if any of our readers feeling an interest in the question will glance 

 over Mr. Salter's able Lecture on Coal, they will learn, if they did 

 not know it before, How coal was made. They will see that the 

 old forests grew rank and luxuriant, that the swamps and great 

 shallow estuaries of the carboniferous lands were densely filled with 

 gigantic marshy plants and trees, and that it was from the fallen 

 leaves commingled with broken and uprooted stems — in short, from 

 the accumulated decay of a living vegetation that the coal-beds were 

 formed. Those masses of vegetable matter which we call coal have 

 always under them a bed of under-clay — the ancient subsoil on which 



