[Footnote 1: A paper read before the Gas Institute, Manchester,
June, 1885.]

By DENNY LANE, of Cork.


Among the most useful inventions of the latter half of the nineteenth
century the gas-engine holds a prominent place. While its development
has not been so brilliant or so startling as that which we can note in
the employment of electricity, it holds, among the applications of
heat, the most important place of any invention made within that
period. Even amid the contrivances by which, in recent times, the
other forces of nature have been subdued to the uses of man, there are
only a few which rival the gas-engine in practical importance. With
regard to the steam-engine itself, it is remarkable how little that is
new has really been invented since the time of Watt and Woulfe. In the
specifications of the former can be shown completely delineated, or
fully foreshadowed, nearly every essential condition of the economy
and efficiency attained in our own days; and it is only by a gradual
"survival of the fittest" of the many contrivances which were made to
carry out his broad ideas that the steam-engine of the present has
attained its great economy.

It is but within the last fifty years that the laws of the relation
between the different physical forces were first enunciated by Justice
Grove, and confirmed by the classical researches of Dr. Joule--the one
a lawyer, working hard at his profession, the other a man of business
engaged in manufacture. Both are still living among us; the latter
having withdrawn from business, while the former is a Judge of the
High Court of Justice. I always regret that the claims of his