1 882. 45 Trans. N. Y. Ac. Set, 



pound. The quantity produced is uncertain, as the miners take care 

 to understate it, for the reason that the Government lays a tax upon 

 all incomes, and the landowner demands his one-fourth of the quan- 

 tity mined. The best authority is Leo Strippelman, who states the 

 ■quantity produced in fifteen years at from 375,000,000 to 400,000,000 

 pounds, worth twenty-four millions of dollars. As the owners of the 

 land get one-fourth of the sum, they received six millions. This is 

 at the rate of four hundred thousand a year, a rather valuable crop 

 from some two hundred acres of land. 



The miners do not support the earth by timber or pillars, as they 

 should ; the result is that the whole plot of about two hundred acres 

 is gradually sinking, and this will eventually ruin the industry in 

 that part of the deposit. In another part of the same field, a French 

 company has purchased forty acres, and it is mining the whole tract 

 and hoisting through one shaft by steam power. In that shaft they 

 have sunk to a depth of six hundred feet, and are troubled with 

 water and petroleum. These they pump out very much the same 

 way as m coal and other mines, worked in a scientific manner. The 

 thickest layer of ozokerite found is about eighteen inches, and this layer 

 or pocket was a great curiosity. When first removed at the bottom of 

 the shaft, it was found to be so soft that it was shovelled out like putty. 

 During the night it oozed into the space that had been emptied the day 

 before ; this continued for weeks, or until the pressure of the gas had 

 become too weak to force it out. 



I have been occupied in the petroleum region of Pennsylvania since 

 i860, have seen all the wonderful development of the oil wells, and was 

 very much interested in contrasting the Austrian ozokerite and petro- 

 leum industry with the American. It is a good illustration of the differ- 

 ence between the lower class of Poles and Jews and the Yankee. Boris- 

 jau, after twenty years work, was unimproved, dirty, squalid and 

 brutal. It contained one school house, but no church nor printing office. 

 None of its streets were paved, and, in the main road through the 

 town, the mud came up to the hubs of the wagon wheels for over a 

 mile of its length. In places, plank had to be set up on edge to keep 

 the mud out of the houses, which were lower than the road. It con- 

 tained numerous shops, where potato whiskey was sold to men, women 

 and children. It depends on a dirty, muddy creek for its supply of 

 water. Its houses were generally one-story, built of logs and mud. 

 On the other hand. Oil City, a town of the same age and size, con- 

 tained eight school houses (one a high school building), twelve churches, 

 and two printing offices. It has paved streets, which, in 1863, were as 

 deep with mud as that in Borislau, in 1879. It has no whiskey shops 

 where women and children can drink. Many of its houses are of brick. 



