Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/121

Rh some day the mountain-crust will subside, and its site be occupied by a bituminous lake, like the Dead Sea of Palestine.

Masses of this chapopote are found floating on the rivers and lagoons, or cast up by the waves all along the Gulf coast, when it is collected for sale, and is of excellent quality—clean, hard, and brilliant. Great beds of this substance are found along the upper waters of the Grijalva River, in the State of Tabasco. The deposits of petroleum are specially noted at El Chapopotito, in the county of Ozuluama, in Vera Cruz.

Though no trace of mineral oil has yet been detected in the rocky regions of Central America, its presence has been abundantly proved on the north of the Southern Continent, where, among the most important of recent discoveries, rank the oil-springs on the shore of Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela, which, together with the great undeveloped coal-mines and other sources of mineral wealth, promise so rich a future to that now waste and desert country.

The chief features of the country between the Cordilleras and the Rio Zulia are the numerous asphalt-mines and petroleum-fountains which abound all around the base of a chain of low hills which lie between the Rio Zulia and Rio Tara. Two other rivers water this country, the Rio Catatumbo and the Rio Sardinarte, which probably accounts for the luxuriance of the cool, dark forest, that contrives to flourish in a region known to the people of Maracaibo as El Infierno, by reason of the multitude of fountains and deposits of petroleum and asphalt.

At one point a raised sand-bank is honeycombed with circular holes, from which gush impetuous streams of boiling water and petroleum. Columns of white steam are also ejected with deafening roar. A careful observer estimated that the flow from one of these streams equaled 5,760 gallons per diem. At present all this good petroleum is soon lost again in the earth, and an immense quantity of inflammable gas also escapes and ignites, playing in weird flashes among the dark treetops. This earth-born lightning is seen by vessels lying off the bar, and is known as El farol de Maracaibo. This group of springs lies near the confluence of the Tara and Sardinarte Rivers, which are navigable for small craft of under fifty tons. But petroleum-fountains, deposits of bitumen, asphalt, and other resinous minerals, lie scattered in all directions; and there is abundant proof of the existence of rich coal-seams, which ere long must certainly create a revolution in Venezuelan commerce.

Near San Timoleo the accumulation of asphalt and petroleum is so extensive as to form a large lake, somewhat resembling the celebrated Pitch Lake on the Isle of Trinidad, where a strange, thick, flexible crust of black bituminous matter is said to float on the surface of a fresh-water lake. But, as no one has yet arrived at even estimating the depth of the crust, it is difficult to see how the existence of the