Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/122

112 said lake can be proved. All that meets the eye is a level plain of pitch about three miles in circumference, dotted over with patches of vegetation and bushes, and pools of rain-water, wherein women wash and bleach their linen, while men with pickaxes dig out large fragments of hard, resinous pitch, which are carried off in carts, all on the surface of the so-called lake. Though only about a hundred acres of pitch are thus exposed to view, the deposit crops up at several points five or six miles to the north and to the south, and appears to be only covered by a thin layer of soil or sand. The lake lies about eighty feet above the sea. As the place of the Pitch Lake, in these notes on the world's oil-supply, may not be self-evident, I may venture to remind my readers that the definition of petroleum (petri oleum, "rock-oil") is "a native liquid bitumen," which is essentially asphalt dissolved in naphtha. So perhaps we shall some day see the people of Trinidad start their own oil-factories. (The neighboring Isle of Barbadoes also contributes its quota to the world's supply of bituminous asphalt.)

There are numerous petroleum-wells actually within the town of Columbia, and, though the oil is of inferior quality and not abundant, the poor collect it in cloths, which absorb the oil, and are then wrung out into jars, and thus they obtain sufficient to light their houses. So long ago as 1824, samples of this "oil of Columbia" were sent to England, France, and the United States, as a remarkable new discovery; but the secret of distillation had not then been discovered, and kerosene and benzine were unknown products, so this South American oil failed to attract attention. In like manner we learn that in remote ages the citizens of Genoa obtained their oil-supply from the wells on the banks of the Taro. And, in the days of Pliny, Sicilian lamps were fed from the oil-springs of Agrigentum; and long before the Christian era the old Romans knew how to turn to account the oil-wells of Zante. Yet no systematic working of any of these wells seems to have been attempted.

Petroleum in some of its varied forms has long been known to exist in many different parts of Europe. In Galicia, Moldavia, and Roumania, it is found in a semi-solidified form, which led to its being named mineral fat or tallow—as in the so-called "tallow-wells," The ozokerite or earth-wax of Galicia is found in great abundance, and of so pure a quality as quite to take the place of beeswax in the manufacture of candles, etc. A considerable number of the population are employed in mining for it, and also in working the industry in all its branches.

So far back as 1873, the annual return of burning-oil and paraffine was valued at a sum equal to £500,000. This was chiefly obtained from the Boryslaw district.

In 1879 an American oil-refiner from Ohio determined to commence work in Galicia on more scientific principles than any hitherto