solution, since employed so extensively as a bleaching agent. In the same year
he became a partner in a firm at Hurlet for the manufacture of alum from alum
schist; and, in 1805, similar works, on a larger scale, were established by the
same company at Campsie. On the death of his father, in 1807, Mr. Macintosh
took possession, with his family, of the house at Dunchattan, near Glasgow,
where he continued till the end of his life to prosecute his chemical researches. In
1822 he obtained a patent for his celebrated invention of the waterproof cloth
distinguished by his name. With a view to the obtaining of ammonia to be
employed in the manufacture of cudbear, Mr. Macintosh, in 1819, entered into
a contract with the proprietors of the Glasgow gas-works, to receive the tar and
other ammoniacal products of the distillation of coal in gas-making. After
separating the ammonia, in converting the tar into pitch, the essential oil named
naphtha is produced; and it occurred to the inventive mind of Mr. Macintosh
to turn this substance to account as a solvent of caoutchouc or India rubber.
He succeeded in producing a waterproof varnish, the thickness and consistency
of which he could vary, according to the quantity of naphtha employed in the
process. Having obtained a patent for this process, he established a manu-
factory of waterproof articles, which was first carried on in Glasgow, but was
eventually transferred to a partnership in Manchester, under the name of Charles
Macintosh & Co. In 1828 Mr. Macintosh joined a copartnery in working the
hot-blast patent of Mr. J. B. Neilson. He first established in Scotland the
manufacture of Prussian blue and prussiate of potash; invented the mode of
topical printing of calico, silks, &c., by the application of the caoutchouc and
naphtha varnish; and invented and patented a process for converting iron into
steel, by means of carburetted hydrogen gas. Mr. Macintosh closed a career
of great usefulness to science and the arts on the 25th of July, 1843, in his
seventy-seventh year.
M'KAIL, Hugh.—Of this young martyr for the cause of religious liberty little has been recorded, except his martyrdom itself. That, however, was an event so striking, that it stands out in strong relief among the similar events of the period, filled though it was with such atrocities of religious persecution as made Scotland for the time an Aceldama among the nations.
Hugh M'Kail was born about the year 1640. His boyhood and youth were thus spent among the most stirring incidents of the Covenant, when the patriotic and religious spirit of our country made a life of ease or indifference almost an impossibility. His studies were prosecuted, with a view to the ministry, at the university of Edinburgh, and when he had entered his twenty-first year he was licensed as a preacher by the presbytery. At this time, also, he appears to have lived with Sir James Stuart of Kirkfield, as his chaplain.
In those days preaching behoved to be a very different matter from what it generally is at present; and when we wonder at the frequency with which public measures were introduced into the pulpit, as well as the severity with which they were often reprobated, we must remember that this was nothing more than what necessity required and duty justified. The age of journalism had not yet fully commenced; and those political movements by which the interests of religion were affected, had no place of discussion or reprobation but the church, so that to "preach to the times" was reckoned the duty of the minister, not only in Scotland, but in England. The pulpit was thus con- strained to occupy that place from which the public press has happily relieved it. Besides, a war at this time was going on in Scotland, that proposed nothing
