Eeview of Reviews, 1/3/13. 



LEADING ARTICLES. 



51 



THE ROMANCE OF PETROL. 



J. Earl Clausen tells the story of 

 petrol — called gasoline in America, es- 

 sence in France — in the Outing Maga- 

 zine. Chemists used to argue that pet- 

 roleum was the child of instantaneous 

 chemical reaction between h\xlrooen and 

 carbon brought into contact under- 

 ground. Geologists have demonstrated, 

 however, that the oil is the product of 

 the slow decomposition of organic re- 

 mains, animal or vegetable, or both. 

 Says Mr. Clauson : — 



THE ORIGINATION OF PETROLEU^M. 

 Some hundreds of thousands of years 

 ago a dinosaur {Stcgosaiinis Ungnla- 

 //L\^), bored b)- the inanities of Mesozoic 

 existence, crawled into a quiet corner, 

 curled up its pretty pink toes, yawned 

 capaciously and — gave up the ghost. 

 There was no funeral. Mourning bands 

 had not been invented. Life was sim- 

 pler in those days ; so was death : the 

 dinosaur just died. And that, say you, 

 was the last of old Colonel Stegosaurus 

 Ungulatus. 



Not at all. For yesterday you poured 

 the remains of the dinosaur from a mea- 

 suring-can — which, let us hope, held hve 

 gallons, full measure — into )our gaso- 

 line tank, and thereby gained power to 

 drive a heavy motor-car twenty miles an 

 hour faster than the legal rate. In the 

 flesh the dinosaur was a clumsy, slow- 

 moving, le.hargic beast, with no desire 

 to move out of a placid walk ; trans- 

 mogrified, he rivals the swiftness of the 

 birds and aids in emulating their flight. 

 Beyond all that, as illustrating the irony 

 of fate, there were no speed laws m the 

 Mesozoic era. 



We mav, therefore, regard crude pet- 

 roleum as of somewhat similar origm 

 to coal, the deposits of which must m 

 time become exhausted, and are justified 

 in allowing our imagination to play 

 leap-frog m that fascinating era when 

 the tread of the megatherium caused the 

 earth to tremble. 



FIRST DISCOVERIES. 



It may be that the Sicilians were the 

 first to discover that crude petroleum 

 was valuable for heating and lighting 



— of that we cannot be certain. Pos- 

 sibly the Chinese were ahead of them, 

 for the ancient volumes of the Celestial 

 Empire contain many references to its 

 emplo}'ment for the ends named. 



Passing hastily down the ages, we 

 note the slcjwly increasing popularity of 

 this great gift of the gods. We find 

 lapan using it in the seventh c-entury of 

 the Christian era, Marco Polo referring 

 to the oil springs of Baku near the end 

 of the thirteenth, and then with a jump 

 of four hundred years we arrive at the 

 first scientific attempt, so far as is 

 known, to free this " earth oil " from its 

 less profitable qualities. 



LETTING LOOSE THE GENIE. 

 It was not until 1735, however, that 

 johann Lerche arrived at the conclusion 

 that distillation was necessary to make 

 crude petroleum a satisfactory combus- 

 tible. For, although the crude oil 

 burned, as the Sicilians had learned 

 long before Christ, it emitted odours 

 so offensive, smoke so dense, and gave 

 so poor a light, that it was not very 

 much better than nothing at all. 



Lerche obtained a bright )-ellow oil, 

 resembling a spirit, which ignited 

 readily, and a dark viscous mass of no 

 very obvious value It is. however, the 

 latter which is now the most valuable, 

 and from which petrol and naphtha are 

 produced. Immense progress in the pro- 

 cess of refining and distilling have been 

 made in recent years. Crude petroleum 

 produces petrol, which constitutes l^ 

 per cent, of the bulk of the crude, 

 naphtha C. 10 per cent., naphtha B. 2-I 

 per cent., and naphtha A. 2 per cent, 

 lubricating oil 15 jicr cent, and a resi- 

 duum mainly of carbon and impurities 

 generally, called coke Kerosene, the il- 

 luminating and burning oil of to-dav, 

 and possibly the motive power of to- 

 morrow, makes uj) b\- volume 50 per 

 cent, of the whole bulk of petroleum, 

 and in consequence is the cheapest of 

 the distillates. 



THE .XRRIX AL OF PETROL. 

 Petrol was, until 1886, a great nuis- 

 ance to the oil distiller; there was no 



