212 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



membering the unprogressive character of Chinese arts and industries 

 there is ground for the belief that they may have been using this nat- 

 ural gas as an illuminant these hundreds of years. 



In the United States the existence of petroleum was known to the 

 Pilgrim Fathers, who doubtless obtained their first information of it 

 from the Indians, for whom, in New York and Western Pennsylvania, 

 it was called Seneka-oil. It was otherwise known as "British " oil and 

 oil of naphtha, and was considered " a sovereign remedy for an inward 

 bruise." 



The record of natural gas in this country is not so complete as that 

 of petroleum, but we learn that an important gas-spring was known in 

 West Bloomfield, N. Y., seventy years ago. In 1864 a well was sunk 

 to a depth of three hundred feet upon that vein, from which a suffi- 

 cient supply of gas was obtained to illuminate and heat the city of 

 Rochester (twenty-five miles distant) it was supposed. But the pipes 

 which were laid for that purpose, being of wood, were unfitted to 

 withstand the pressure, in consequence of which the scheme was aban- 

 doned ; but gas from that well is now in use as an illuminant and as 

 fuel both in the town of West Bloomfield and at Honeoye Falls. The 

 village of Fredonia, N. Y., has been using natural gas in lighting the 

 streets for thirty years or thereabout. On Big Sewickley Creek, in 

 Westmoreland County, Pa., natural gas was used for evaporating 

 water in the manufacture of salt thirty years ago, and gas is still issu- 

 ing at the same place. Natural gas has been in use in several localities 

 in Eastern Ohio for twenty-five years, and the wells are flowing as 

 vigorously as when first known. It has also been in use in West Vir- 

 ginia for a quarter of a century, as well as in the petroleum region of 

 Western Pennsylvania, where it has long been utilized in generating 

 steam for drilling oil-wells. 



In 1826 the "American Journal of Science" contained a letter 

 from Dr. S. P. Hildreth, who, in writing of the products of the Muskin- 

 gum (Ohio) Valley, said : " They have sunk two wells, which are now 

 more than four hundred feet in depth ; one of them affords a very 

 strong and pure salt-water, but not in great quantity ; the other dis- 

 charges such vast quantities of petroleum, or, as it is vulgarly called, 

 'Seneka-oil,' and besides is so subject to such tremendous explosions 

 of gas, as to force out all the water and afford nothing but gas for sev- 

 eral days, that they make little or no salt." 



The value of the foregoing references is to be found in the testi- 

 mony they offer as to the duration of the supply of natural gas. 

 Whether we look to the eternal flaming fissures of the Caucasus, or to 

 New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, there is much to encourage the 

 belief that the flow of natural gas may be, like the production of 

 petroleum, increased rather than diminished by the draughts made 

 upon it. Petroleum, instead of diminishing in quantity by the mill- 

 ions of barrels drawn from Western Pennsylvania in the last quarter 



