TEST OF THE ANTICLINAL THEORY. L95 



Guided by this theory I located in 1884 the important gas and oil 

 field near Washington, Pennsylvania; also the Grapevine gas field along 

 that great arch of the same name in Westmoreland county ; and the Belle 

 Vernon field on the Monongahela river. On the same theory I located 

 and mapped out, for Mr. J. M. Guffey, the celebrated Taylortown oil 

 field of Washington county months before the drill demonstrated the 

 truth of my conclusions. And right here on this Mannington-Mount 

 Morris belt a derrick was built to bore for oil on one of my locations at 

 Fairview more than five years before the drill finally proved that my loca- 

 tion was immediately over one of the richest pools of oil in the country, 

 and before the drill had shown that there was any oil in this portion of 

 West Virginia. These are only a few of the positive fruits of the theory 

 to which we can point ; the negative results in condemning immense 

 areas for both oil and gas being even more important in preventing un- 

 necessary expenditure and waste of capital where a search for either gas 

 or oil would have certainly been in vain. 



An important corollary, drawn from the " anticlinal theory " of gas and 

 oil, and announced as probably true in my article in The Petroleum Age 

 for March, 1886, was that the pressure under which the oil and gas in 

 any rock or field are found is of artesian origin ; or in other words that 

 the initial pressure in any oil or gas field is measured by the pressure of 

 a column of water equal in height to that which rises from the same n >ck 

 when water is struck instead of oil or gas. This was announced as the 

 most probable theory in the paper referred to, and Professor Orton has 

 since* demonstrated the theory to be true in Ohio with reference to the 

 gas pressures in the Trenton limestone. 



The problem of proving that the oil and gas pressures found in the 

 various sands of Pennsylvania and West Virginia are due to artesian 

 pressure is not so simple as in Ohio, since the one rock there emerges 

 from the earth at the level of lake Superior, while the several sand hori- 

 zons of West Virginia and Pennsylvania come up in many regions of the 

 country from the base of the Alleghanies westward to the Ohio river ami 

 northward to lake Erie, so that one can never he certain as to the exact 

 datum plane from which to measure the top of the water column which 

 gives origin to pressure; and therefore while the observations prove the 

 general truth of the theory of artesian pressure for the •"white sand" 

 rocks of Pennsylvania and Wot Virginia, they are not so complete and 

 demonstrative as in Ohio'ahd Indiana. 



The gradual increase of pressure with depth is strikingly shown in Pie 

 following scries : 



I. ! Soi lm., vol i. 1889, pp. 87 'I 



X X \ I l',i i i Iimi Soi \ * Vol I 1801 



