OIL, OR PETROLEUM.
No work on our mineral resources, and particularly mineral fuels, would be complete without a practical or theoretical notice of our great petroleum regions. To this end we have collected all the available information on the subject, and have not only made extensive examinations personally, but have availed ourselves of the practical experience of others. Petroleum contains the constituents of coal, or vice versa. The one is solid, the other fluid. Both are formed principally of carbon and hydrogen ; the one with earthy impurities, the other almost pure. We therefore look upon petro leum as a species of mineral fuel, the product principally of our coal fields, enhancing their value, providing for their development, and, while it fills some of the uses to which coal has been applied, it increases the area of its distribution and enlarges the sphere of its usefulness.
In a rapid glance over the field of our researches,—our extensive fields of coal, our mountains and beds of ores, and our deep fountains of mineral oils,—we cannot fail to be impressed with admiration and wonder at those magnificent creations of Nature, when we reflect that they are the result of chemical action and combination carried on in her great laboratory.
The productions of vegetation, whose original magnificence and extent are beyond comprehension, has been preserved year after year, through numberless ages, in the most compact and available form for use. Un
limited beds of precious ores, and exhaustless fountains of invaluable oils, are stored away by nature in the treasure-houses of our mineral kingdom. Those exhaustless sources of mineral wealth are not the result of common causes. Ore, coal, and oil are not formations resulting from the evident processes which we all comprehend, and such as we see in common rocks and slates; but they appear to be the concentrated wealth of all our litho logical creations, separated and refined in the great laboratory of Nature, and stored carefully away in the "caves of the earth" for the use of her creatures.
There is something grand and wonderful in those great chemical pro cesses which stored our earth with minerals, even though we speculate merely on their cause and effect. We can imagine the world of fire which rolled and struggled for vent in the bowels of the earth, the immeasur able volumes of gases which poured from these smouldering fires, the great volcanic crucibles and the oceanic cauldrons which Nature used, if we cannot comprehend the modes and laws of her great chemical opera tions. The results, however, we see and realize. They give to man the control of Nature's domain, and subject all her productions to his use and pleasure. A proper appreciation of her gifts and provisions for our use will make us "healthy, wealthy, and wise," and secure us peace, power, and prosperity.