GASOLENE 13 



ship the Fountain of Everlasting Fire, rightly regarding 

 it as somehow a gift from the sun, though how they could 

 not tell, any more than can the modern geologists just 

 how the energy of the solar rays came to be embodied in 

 the blazing oil. Marco Polo, who passed through 

 Baku on his way to Far Cathay, says that a hundred 

 ships might be filled at a time from the lake of oil, and 

 he notes, quite correctly, that it is not good to eat but 

 good to burn and to cure the sore backs of camels. 



To-day this same Caucasian oil, which was to the 

 Persians the object of adoration and to the Greeks the 

 subject of a grotesque story, is to the modern world a 

 source of power and the desire of all nations. It is the 

 only liquid asset of the Bolsheviki and their efforts to 

 bargain it off to the highest bidder broke up the Genoa 

 Conference and are holding up The Hague. From 1898 

 to 1901 a ten-mile square of the Baku district supplied 

 nearly half the world's output of oil and it is still the 

 greatest source of the Old World. 



FIRST USES OF AMERICAN OIL. But the United 

 States has been favoured above all other nations in the 

 endowment of oil, and it was here that it first became an 

 important factor in civilization. It was from the 

 earliest time used in Pennsylvania, as Marco Polo saw 

 it used five hundred years before in the Caucasus, to 

 cure the sore backs of beasts of burden. The Indians 

 spread their blankets on the creeks that carried a film 

 of oil and wrung them out. The product was sold to 

 the Whites as "Seneca Oil" for man and beast at $2 

 a gallon. A little more than a century ago a well was 

 being drilled for brine in Kentucky when there burst 



