THE NAl'IITIfA INDUSTRY. 261 



ploymeiit of such a valuable product as the refuse can be only temporary in such 

 transitional moments of the industrial activity of a country such as Russia is now passing- 

 through, when the industry has not yet succeeded in laying- itself in the true course 

 •of the stream, which is now everywhere dependent upon the employment of coal. 

 From the point of view of its quantity naphtha fuel can only have a small 

 fraction of the importance which coal has, as is sufficiently proved by the fact that 

 the production of coal over the earth is now over 500 million tons, while that of 

 naphtha is about 10 million tons ; that is, if all the naphtha were employed as fuel 

 it would, upon the estimation that one ton of naphtha is equal to one and a half 

 tons of coal, only replace 3 per cent of the coal now consumed. Thus, the 

 present consumption of 130 million ponds of naphtha refuse in Russia, must 

 be regarded as a temporary phenomenon, dependent on the one hand, upon 

 the want of a market for the excess of naphtha, and on the other hand, upon 

 a want of activity in the exploitation of the Russian coal, which is so widely 

 distributed over the Empire, and especially in the centre and south-east. The 

 laying- down of the Baku-Batoum pipe line, the regulation of the course of the riv- 

 ers Don and Donets, whose water courses are several times greater than the basins 

 of such rivers as the Rhine, the construction of railways from the Donets coal dis- 

 trict to the Volga, and such like measures for utilizing the naphtha stores of the 

 Volga and for a cheap mode of transport for the Donets coal, form an immediate 

 problem in the industrial life of Russia, and will put an end to the irrationally large 

 consumption of the Baku naphtha refuse for steam power which is now practised. 

 There is no reason for thinking that, even were the employment of naphtha refuse 

 as fuel entirely stopped, it would be prejudicial to the steam navigation of the Caspian 

 and lower courses of the Volga, because at first this refuse would be replaced 

 by the heavy kinds of naphtha, and after a time by the Donets and Ural coal. More- 

 over, the author is of the opinion that coal seams should be found in the Kolmuk 

 steppes between the Donets and Volga, and the exploitation of this coal would have 

 great influence upon the shores of the Caspian Sea. 



Naphtha i n d u s t e y on the A p s h e r on peninsula. 



The mode of occurrence of naphtha in the Caucasus differs from that in Ame- 

 rica, as shown by the fact that in the United States there are tens of thousands of 

 wells under exploitation in order to obtain 300,000,000 pouds of naphtha per year, 

 while at Baku 500 wells yield the same quantity of oil. The Caucasus deposits 

 may be regarded as sufficiently investigated from the point of view of its exploita- 

 tion for the Apsheron peninsula only, because this district has not only contained 

 numerous wells from very ancient times, but also owing to its being the object 

 of full and systematically edited reports, which in recent years have been compiled 

 by the Excise Department and by a special committee of the naphtha traders. The 

 following forms an extract of the data for the last years. 



The naphtha of the Apsheron peninsula is chiefly obtained from the wells by 

 one of two methods : by means of buckets or fountains. The bucket system consists in lower- 

 ing on a cable, by means of mechanical appliances such as windlasses or steam haulage 



