1897.] NATURE AND ORIGIN OF PETROLEUM. Ill 



rated with bitumen, but for the most part clean and white. These 

 formations extend across the country, parallel for miles with the 

 general trend of the Coast Ranges. Enormous springs of maltha, 

 issuing therefrom at intervals, have produced at several points 

 flood-plains of asphaltum that fill the small valleys like a glacier, 

 many feet in depth and square miles in extent. The maltha is in- 

 variably accompanied with water, and at several points there are 

 evidences that at some period in the past history of those outflows 

 the springs that are now cold have been gigantic hot springs of sili- 

 cated water, similar to those that I believe produced the famous 

 Pitch Lake of Trinidad. 



I went to Trinidad prepared to find abundant evidence of the 

 direct conversion of wood into bitumen, as described by Wall and 

 Sawkins. I saw nothing of the kind ; nor could I find any one else 

 who had. A superstition among the natives ascribes to the black 

 mangrove the power of secreting bitumen. This shrub grows with 

 its roots in sea water and often covered with oysters. The move- 

 ment of the tide, the most nearly eternal phenomenon in nature, 

 bears the bitumen that rises from the bottom of the sea against the 

 oyster shells, and their jagged edges gather the floating particles. 

 The entire deposit of pitch, both within and without the lake, 

 contains on an average ten per cent, of partially decayed vegeta- 

 tion, and also an amount, difficult to estimate, of branches, trunks 

 and stumps of trees, some of the latter of enormous size, much 

 larger than any now standing in the vicinity. I did not see the 

 outcrop of the lignite bed to the south of the lake that dips at an 

 angle that would send it under the lake, as described by Manross, 

 but I was told by one who had seen it, that this lignite bed, twelve 

 feet in thickness, contained branches, trunks and stumps of trees 

 that were in exactly the same condition as those found in the pitch 

 — that is, they were still wood — not having been changed into lig- 

 nite, and therefore not capable of being distilled by hot silicated 

 water into pitch. 



The circumstances of my life have brought me into personal con- 

 tact with deposits of bitumen over a very wide area, and under such 

 conditions as have afforded me very unusual opportunities for a 

 careful study of all the phenomena attending the appearance of 

 bitumen at the surface of the earth ; the result of which has been 

 to confirm the opinion that I have heretofore expressed, that, in 

 the majority of instances, bitumens, from natural gas to asphaltum. 



