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 Gillespies 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 coaZ-beds were 
formed. Those masses of vegetable matter which we call coal have 
3,lways under them a bed of under-clay— the ancient subsoil on which 
