The inflammable gases were known originally for their direful effects rather than their useful qualities. Miners were acquainted with two of them, called the _choke damp_ and the _fire damp_, long before the establishment of the Royal Society; but the earliest printed account of either occurs in its Transactions, in the year 1667. The paper in which it is contained, is entitled, "A Description of a Well and Earth in Lancashire taking Fire, by a Candle approaching to it. Imparted by Thomas Shirley, Esq an eye-witness." Dr. Stephen Hales was the first person who procured an elastic fluid from the actual distillation of coal. His experiments with this object are related in the first volume of his Vegetable Statics, published in 1726. From the distillation of "one hundred and fifty-eight grains of Newcastle coal, he states that he obtained one hundred and eighty cubic inches of air, which weighed fifty-one grains, being nearly one third of the whole." The inflammability of the fluid he thus produced was no part of his inquiry; and though it is now deemed its most useful and important property, appears to have excited no attention till several years after. In the "Philosophical Transactions" for 1733, some properties of coal-gas are detailed in a paper called, "An Account of the Damp Air in a Coal-pit of Sir James Lowther, sunk within Twenty Yards of the Sea." This paper, as it contains some striking facts relating to the inflammability and other properties of coal-gas, is deserving of particular attention. The principal properties of coal-gas are here related with remarkable minuteness and precision; and as the writer exhibited them to different members of the Royal Society, and showed that after keeping the gas sometime, it still retained its elasticity and inflammability, it is remarkable, that the philosophers of the time undertook no experiments with the view of applying it to useful purposes. Dr. John Clayton, in an extract from a letter in the "Philosophical Transactions" for 1735, calls gas the "spirit" of coal; and came to a knowledge of its inflammability by an accident. This "spirit" chanced to catch fire, by coming in contact with a candle, as it was escaping from a fracture in one of his distillatory vessels. By preserving the gas in bladders, he frequently diverted his friends, by exhibiting its inflammability. This is the nearest approach to the idea of practically applying this property. The subject attracted the attention of Dr. Richard Watson, who published the results of his researches in the second volume of his "Chemical Essays." He dwells upon the elasticity and inflammability of coal-gas; and remarked, that it retains these properties _after passing through a great quantity of water_.