Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/129

Rh provides in its five hundred great iron tanks storage for upward of 30,000,000 barrels! The company receive all the oil yielded by the wells of certain districts, and account to the owners of each for the amount received.

The oil thus obtained is not all alike in quality. There are a few wells at Mecca in Ohio, some in Illinois, and others near Franklin in Pennsylvania, where it is of extraordinary thickness, and can be used as grease without further preparation. It fetches about five times the price of ordinary crude petroleum, and at the present moment sells at £4 per barrel. At Mecca this lubricating oil is found in an area fifteen miles in length by five in width. It is estimated that 500,000 barrels have already been taken out, by pumping wells at an average of forty feet in depth.

Passing north across Lake Erie to the "Dominion," we find four distinct oil-bearing areas. They lie in Tilsonburg, Enniskillen, Mosa, and Oxford townships. As in the States, so in Canada, the oil-region has been suggestively named Petrolea—a name, however, which applies especially to this principal city.

It is just about twenty years since Mr. Murray, geological surveyor, in riding through the dense untrodden forests of oak and hickory, observed here and there beds of bituminous matter, and on closer examination he became convinced that these were deposits where oil-springs had overflowed and evaporated. At a place now known as Thamesville (the counterpart of the Titusville of Pennsylvania) he perceived oil floating on a stream, and found that there, too, the people were in the habit of gathering up this scum in flannel, and using it as ointment for wounds on horses.

He called official attention to the subject, and soon the silence of the forests was a thing of the past, and the district was overrun by crowds of busy men.

Now oil cities "spring up" with mushroom speed, wherever productive springs are struck in new districts. With oil, as with all else in the States and the Dominion, there is a constant movement toward the northwest; and every one, who finds his oil-supply failing, as a matter of course moves to the northwest, taking with him his pump and derrick, and all the casing of the well, and sets up his drilling apparatus wherever the ground appears most promising.

The yield of oil is not to be compared with that of the Pennsylvania springs, and two years ago it was estimated that the sixteen hundred wells then in active operation did not collectively yield on an average more than 2,400 barrels per diem. The richest well at present is "The Lawyer," near Marthaville, which has an average flow of eighty barrels a day; but, on the other hand, many only yield one barrel. The oil here is generally a greenish-black fluid of the consistency of sirup, and is mixed with much water and some gas.