Nature's Riches.

Southland Times, Issue 4700, 31 July 1883, Page 3

Nature's Riches.

■ At the, opening of : his article upon the Standard Oil Company in the North American Review, Senator Camden weaves some: of the wonderfulfacts in: regard to petroleum into the following picturesque paragraph :— " Few things in fiction are more wonderful than the history of petroleum since tbe opening of the first oil well in ♦Pennsylvania, August 28th, 1859. Four I years' before that time Jonathan Watson, ' who owned a tract 6f land on Oil Creek, 'noticed oil flowing from. a spring. Ha took a bottle of it to Hartford, Conn., to have it' analysed by a well-kuown chemist. This authority pronounced it an artificial product and not a natural one. Had any person then predicted that North- Western Pennsylvania and W«st Virginia would be found to contain vast resources of this oil, and that it wouHin a score of years have added 1,000,000,000 dols. to the wealth of the nation, he would have been conpidered insane. Yet puch a prediction would have fallen short of the truth. There are to-day more than 20,000 wells producing this oil and over 100,000 persons are exclusively engaged in handling it. Railroads have been built to transport it, while through a network of over 4000 miles of iron pipes, running over mountains, beneath rivers, and through cultivated fields streams of it pulsate continually. Oil from the well* in Pennsylvania lights the streets of South -American cities, cathedrals in Europe, the mosques of Asia, tbn shop windows of Jerusalem, and it is known and used over the * whole civilised world." As to American exportation of petroleum, the same writer B •_" Beginning in 1862 wiili shipments of 588,000 gallons of oil to Germany, which was, sold for 2000 dollars less than the cost of transportation across the sea, the exportation of oil has Steadily increased, until it now reaches but little less than 2,000,000 gallons a day. For the first seven months of 1882 the ▼alue i of the exports of petroleum and its products was 30,946,856d015, which was exceeded only by the exports of cotton and oereals. During the first eight months of - 1882, 433,251,181 galionß of crude oil, or its equivalent in refined, were exported, iagainßt 399,016,248 gallons during the corrospoDdinK period of 1881.'