Oil shale contains little or no oil as such, but it contains an organic material from which oil may be produced by destructive distillation. This statement or others conveying the same meaning appears in many popular and technical articles on oil shale. It is based on the belief that the ordinary solvents of petroleum have but little action on the organic substances contained in oil-yielding shales, although on distillation these same shales may yield upwards of 50 gallons of crude shale oil per ton. A 50-gallon shale thus yields by distillation 18.73 percent of its weight as oil (assuming the specific gravity of the oil to be 0.900), although only a relatively small part of this can be recovered by extraction with such solvents as chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, and the like. In the course of certain experiments designed to determine the solubility of different shales after they had begun to yield oil by distillation, it was found desirable to determine the quantity dissolved from certain unheated shales by various solvents, at or near the boiling points of these solvents. The method used and results obtained are presented below. These experiments were made in connection with the oil-shale investigations being conducted by the U.S. Bureau on Mines, in cooperation with the states of Colorado and Utah.