13 



is in the parish of Waldron. The well-known geologst G deon 

 Mantell, who disposed of his geological collection to the British 

 Mu^un for five thousand pounds, and afterwards received a 

 penSon from the Crown, has recorded in his work on the 

 geology 0? Sussex, published in 1822, that at Newick Old 

 Park, Waldron, "seams of fibrous ^oa - ^«««"^bhng tha o 

 Bovey," had been discovered, but the thickness and extent o 

 The beds had not been correctly ascertained, /no her account 

 states that at Waldron a thin bed of " cannel coal had W 

 noticed on the banks of a rivulet which separates that parish 

 from He h .M, the seam being Z^und to extend for a quarter 

 of a mile immediately beneath the suriace. It happens that thi 

 rivulet passes under the railway about three hundred yards om 

 the bore-hole at the station. Lignite was found in the boring 

 and this material seems to exist rather plentifully m parts of 

 East Sussex. It is even alleged that beds of ^g^^J^ ^\^J.^^^^ 

 two feet thick, resembling cannel have been ^ 7/^<i ^^ Ja dron 

 The existence of lignite and " natural gas in the same district 

 is perhaps, a mer^e coincidence, and yet the conjunction may 

 have some significance. But the presence of the gas ^s un^ 

 deniable, and°if it exists in any considerable 1«antity there 

 ou"ht to be some use found for it. That the Heathfield (or 

 Waldron) supply should continue flowing after the lapse of 

 eigCn months may be accepted as proof that the source is 



""^ ThUxSce^of petroleum has been detected in this country 

 at difierent times, especially in the West of England Consider- 

 able interest was excited in 1894 by a discovery of this k nd at 

 Ashwick Court, in Somersetshire. If of no commercial import- 

 ance, the matter is still one of the greatest historica interest as 

 the shale oil industry is the direct outcome of the distillation of a 

 small outflow of petroleum at Alfreton, ^^ Derbyshire and the 

 American petroleum industry itself, as will be shown later on, 

 may be indirectly traced to the same source. Numerous refer- 

 ences to the occurrence of " naphtha" or " liquid bitumen and 

 even to emanations of natural gas, occur in the early numbers of 

 the " Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. in the 

 volume for 1684, is a paper by Dr. Robert Plot in which he 

 expresses the belief that the perpetual lamps ^aid to be found 

 alight in ancient tombs might be 0^"^^^ of a wick of linum 

 asbestinum," or "salamander wool "-the material whch we 

 now call asbestos,-fed by a natural spring of naphtha such as 

 that of Pitchford, in Shropshire, where, he says, "is a naphtha 

 or liquid bitumen which constantly issues forth with a spring 

 there and floats on the water." This spring which is still m 

 existence, at one time (at the beginning of the century) had 

 consTderable celebrity, as the oil was distiUed and sold as Betton s 



