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PREFACE.

The legislature responsive to the popular voice, andfortified in its responsibility, by the results of specialenquiries which were ordered to be made into the meritsof the invention, and in which I had the good fortuneto be professionally engaged, gave the most liberal anddecided encouragement to its adoption.

Capital, often wanting even in this opulent country forundertakings of magnitude, came to the promotion ofthe new art of procuring and distributing light in over-flowing abundance; and already ere many years areelapsed, such has been the rapidity with which the gaslight illumination has advanced, that there is not a cityand scarcely a town of any note in Great Britain, inwhich the art of lighting by means of gas, has not beencarried into effect, or in which active measures are not inprogress, to participate in the benefit of this importantdiscovery.

When the art was yet in its infancy, I published aTreatise , containing a description of the apparatus andmachinery best calculated for illuminating streets, houses,and public buildings, by means of coal gas, with remarkson the utility, safety, and general nature of this newbranch of domestic economy, as far as then understood,and practised in the metropolis.

The universal avidity for information on the subject,more perhaps than any particular merit in the work