CARBON—LITTLE D1. 
Bitumen, asphalt, and jet were undoubtedly the members of 
the petroleum series first recognized and used by man. Jet beads 
are found among the deposits in the paleolithic caves of Belgium 
and Switzerland. ‘The Greeks prized jet as an amulet protecting its 
wearer against the perils of the sea, and in the eighteenth century 
Whitby jet, found in the neighborhood of Whitby Abbey, in Eng- 
land, was a fashionable, though somber ornament. 
ASPHALT 
Asphalt and bitumen are complex mixtures of compounds of car- 
bon and hydrogen, in which the carbon content commonly ranges 
from 85 to 95 per cent. ‘They occur in so-called lakes, deposits, and 
fissures in many parts of the world. One of the largest of these 
asphalt lakes is found in the island of Trinidad, and one of the 
most interesting is located in Los Angeles County, Calif. The 
Trinidad lake has an area of 115 acres and is 135 feet deep at the 
center. It has been the source of much of the asphalt used in road 
making, roofing, sheathing paper, and asphalt shingles. The Cali- 
fornia lake has been a pitfall and a sepulcher for thousands of pre- 
historic animals and a mine of richest treasures for the geologist. 
Here mammoths were entangled like flies on sticky paper, and the 
saber-toothed tiger, seeking water in the pools of its treacherous, 
dust-covered surface, or springing upon his ensnared prey was 
himself enmeshed to leave his bones commingled with those of my- 
riads of other victims. 
In Utah there is a notable deposit of high-grade asphalt known 
commercially as Gilsonite. It occurs in veins often as much as 18 
feet in width, extending, in some cases, for 8 miles, and the deposit 
is estimated to contain more than 30,000,000 tons of the material. 
In Egypt, at one time, the terms for “asphalt” and “mummy ” 
were synonymous owing to the practice of the Egyptians of preserv- 
ing-the bodies of the dead by wrapping them in asphalt-coated cloths. 
Thousands of years ago the Persians carved vases and animals in 
asphalt and set the eyes in statues with it. There was, near Babylon, 
a great asphalt lake, and the bricks of the walls and palaces raised 
by Semiramis and the kings of Babylon were bonded with asphalt 
cement. An inscription of about 600 B. C. records that Nabopolassar, 
the father of Nebuchadnezzar, “made a road glistening with asphalt 
and burnt brick,” which we may assume to be the earliest asphalted 
block pavement. 
NATURAL GAS 
At the other extreme of the petroleum series and commonly asso- 
ciated with petroleum, we find natural gas which has been termed 
