There was no one better acquainted with that subject than a friend of his—a gentleman very eminent both in science and in law. He meant Mr. Grove; and those members of the legal profession who had to encounter Mr. Grove in a Patent case knew they had a very difficult task indeed before them. Now, here were the words of Mr. Grove in reference to that subject:— “Always when a discovery has been made when the public has reaped the fruits of it, there is no case, and never was a case, either in the history of pure science or in the history of practical discovery, where it is not alleged, ‘If you look at such a book and such another book, you will find that so and so has been done, and you will find that it has been anticipated.’ That is partly true and partly false. There are in all such cases approximate anticipations. The difference is, that one man gets at the points, hits the real thing which will do it, and the reason why it will; whereas other people, although they may have got the thing, have not acquired an accurate knowledge which will enable them with certainty to produce it.” That showed the House that the race was often so close that even the man who had hit the thing might be shut out by somebody else who did it a trifle better. Nothing could be more true than that. Would the House allow him to quote the example of a very important Patent, which he thought would make the matter clear, and indicate how much they might lose by a system of that description. For a very long time the distillation of oils from shale and coal had been a matter of the common knowledge—aye, and of the common practice, of mankind. Early in the present, or towards the end of the last century, it was practised by means precisely similar in all points to those which the present patentees used in this country. But it was not known commercially that there was such a thing as paraffin, nor was it known commercially how to distil it. The oil was, indeed, obtained in a rough way, and without that nicety of discrimination which afterwards resulted from scientific knowledge of the article itself. All chemists knew that in order to distil these oils it was necessary to keep the temperature as low as possible. This was the state of knowledge when a great German chemist discovered that by operating on wood, tar, and other substances, he could produce paraffin in small quantities. He also said it could be got from coals in precisely the same way as was subsequently done by patentees in this country. But still the German chemist’s experiments were of a scientific and not of a commercial character. He neither produced it commercially nor did he hit upon the material from which it could be commercially produced. The same oil could be produced from shale. Only the other day there was discovered in Scotland a new kind of mineral, as to which the scientific world were at variance whether it was coal or shale.