Excerpt from The Manufacture of Light: A Lecture Delivered at the Meeting of the British Association at York Primitive man also discovered that a piece of dry wood, or a rope of grass dipped into melted fat, would make an excellent torch; and by dipping a dried rush into molten tallow he procured for himself in small portable form a candle. To substitute a woven wick, and to devise means of casting tallow or wax around the wick in a mould, were improvements devised a little more than a hundred years ago. If we were to go back to the days of good Queen Bess we should find that the means of lighting either hovel or palace were primitive in the extreme. In the guttering of the rushlights and the splutter and smell of the lamps fed with animal oil we should scarcely rejoice. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.