PETROLEUM.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXXX, Issue 13101, 14 June 1913, Page 10

PETROLEUM.

OILY FOL'VTAINS FROM THE EARTH.

_ Oil fro- 1 tne earth— petroleum means simply 'tuck oil"— has been used at least ZCZO years. 0-.1, -vc are told, is the nv:-t modern source of power, but it 13 at least as old a.s tlie Tower of BabeJ. The "slime", spoken of m the Old ystament ua being i:&ad for mdrtarin the building of ths tower was petroleum, and Herodotus' speakes of the oil-pits m the -plains -of Babylon. The ■explorers 'of tho ruins -of Nineveh have found the remains of mineral oil used as cement m the bric'.c buildings of the Assyrian c.-. pital. The Spaniards, too, when they arrived m Anlerica, found oil pits lined with timber', which had been dug, not by the natives then living m the new world, but by some earlier race that had lived long ■ before Columbus ever thought of sailing away to the setting sun, ssys the Children's Magazine. It is m modern times, and even within the last 100 years, that the rise of oil as one of. the world's most important commercial products has ; come about. There are few things more valuable to-day. And yet the. keen business men who first found the vast stores of petroleum hidden m the earth did not want oil, and were only too glad to see Jt run away m the creeks and river-beds. Some of them, however, lived [to learn . that they watched a fortune run to. waste. In the early part' of tho nineteenth bentury the men boring artesian wells m America, to get at the brine for their salt works, struck oil unexpectedly, and were disgusted \ because the oil mixed with their brine and spoilt it.

. About the middle of the nineteenth century, men set to work studying oil. The whale-fishers who came back from the northern seas returned year after year with- the hews that whales Were getting scarce j and" were likely soon to be extinct. At. that time most of the o$L used for lighting came from whaleß. So men made experiments, first with the oil from the ; shale m coal mines, and they were able to distil from this a very good illuminant, which they called kerosene, because it could be made into a ■solid wax, and kerosene is from the iGreek word for wax. At once a big industry 'sprang up m i preparing shale ■oil | but the success m this direction set other investigators at work, and they {were soon able to refine the crude petrojleum itself, ,of which : vast quantities nvere discovered m America.

The suply of oil that the earth yields is almost fabulous. The annua! production of petroleum is nearly 10,000,000,000 gallons, tlie value Of which is about £200.000,000, and of this supply onehalf is produced m America alone. How the oil came to be m the earth is difficult to say. It used to bethought tliat it was formed m the rocks by the decomposition of animal and vegetable matter ;' bpt; as it exists m large quantities in.-rbeks containing little, evidence of animal and vegetable life, it is now [thought that the oil was distilled by jtho chemical action of the minerals m :iges past, somewhat m the same way jf- we are able to distil oil froni the Sshale. :