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pieces of apparatus for tlie experiments. By his usefulness and 
intelligence he eventually became assistant to Professor Graham, 
and lectured when the Professor was absent. He lield tbe assistant- 
sliip for seven years, and accompanied Professor Graham to London 
when the latter obtained a chair in University College. Among 
liis friends at Glasgow were Dr Stenhouse, F.B.S., Dr Lyon 
Playfair, and Charles Griffin, an eminent manufacturer of chemical 
apparatus. 
Young now engaged in the great enterprise from which he 
became widely known as a public benefactor, and which was destined 
to bring him both fame and profit. One Mr Oakes mentioned to Dr 
Lyon Playfair that there was oil flowing from a pit at Alf reton in 
Derbyshire. Dr Playfair then told this to Young, who at once 
perceived what an improvement might be made in the system of 
domestic lighting by the utilisation of this natural product. The 
flow of petroleum, small though it was, from the source in question, 
and the results obtained from it by Young, were the means of leading 
the Americans to avail themselves of the vast supplies of this useful 
substance that are to be found in their own continent. 
The discovery, however, with which his name is most intimately 
associated, was his mode of obtaining oils from coal and shale, by 
which he succeeded in producing an ilium inant oil at a price which 
enabled him to compete with the oil that was latterly obtained in 
such quantities from the petroleum springs in America. 
Young did not discover solid paraffin; two little bits had been 
produced before his time ; but he saw that it could be profitably 
made on a large scale, and, by the methods he introduced, hundreds 
of tons of solid paraffin are now made annually, and by his 
improved processes in the manufacture of this article he has 
transformed the candle, as he had previously by the introduction of 
petroleum transformed the lamp. 
He founded a chair for the advancement of Technical or 
Economic Chemistry in Anderson’s College, Glasgow, whilst he 
liberally contributed to the endowment of professorships in other 
branches of science in that institution. 
When he worked in the laboratory of Professor Graham, solid 
caustic soda, as now manufactured on a large scale, could only be 
made in small quantities in silver vessels. Dr Young first made 
