190 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
XIII. — A Chemical Examination of the Organic Matter in Oil- 
Shales. By John B. Robertson, M.A., B.Sc., Carnegie Scholar. 
Communicated by Dr J. S. Flett, F.R.S. 
(MS. received February 28, 1914. Read March 16, 1914.) 
Historical. 
Investigations into the nature of the organic matter in oil-shales began 
at the time of the famous Torbanehill case in 1854, when experts attempted 
to settle the question as to whether the substance known as “ Torbanite ” 
or “ Boghead Mineral ” was a coal or an oil-shale. Several witnesses at the 
trial (Gillespie v. Russel, Session Papers , 1854) maintained that the oil- 
producing material in the Mineral was of organic origin, while others 
pronounced it to be bituminous and produced by subaqueous eruptions. 
T. S. Traill, M.D., proposed for the Boghead Mineral the name “ Bitumenite,” 
as it seemed to him to “ consist of much bitumen, mingled with earthy 
matter” {Trans. Roy. Soc. Edin., 1857, xxi. p. 7). Dr Redfern (Quart. 
Journ. Micros. Soc., 1855, x. pp. 118-119), on the other hand, supposed the 
round orange-yellow bodies which occur in torbanite to have had their origin 
in “ a mass of vegetable cells and tissues which have been disintegrated and 
otherwise changed by maceration, pressure, and chemical action, and 
subsequently solidified.” C. E. Bertrand and B. Renault (Bull. Soc. Hist. 
Nat. Autun, 1892-3) on microscopic examination have classed these bodies 
as the remains of gelatinous algae which have been altered by bacterial 
action. They ascribe the genus “ Pila ” to those occurring in the northern 
and “Reinschia” to those found in the southern hemisphere, class the 
bacteria as “ micrococci,” and represent the transformation of the vegetable 
matter by the equation 
C 12 H 20 Oio = 2C 2 H 3 + 5C0 2 + 3CH 4 + 2H. 
This equation is purely empirical, although no doubt carbon dioxide, 
methane, and hydrogen are products of bacterial action upon organic matter. 
Recently this view has been disputed by E. C. Jeffrey (Rhodora, vol. xi. 
p. 61), who has subjected bogheads to a chemical treatment with nitric 
and hydrofluoric acids before making sections, and has affirmed that 
“ the so-called algae ” are in reality “ the strongly sculptured megaspores 
of vascular cryptogams.” Dr W. Scheithauer (Oil-Shales and Tars, 1913) 
