JUNE 21, 1912] 
sulphuretted hydrogen escaping from the earth 
under certain conditions deposited sulphur in crev- 
ices near the surface. Such phenomena he ob- 
served at Spindle Top before commencing his well. 
At High Island, Galveston County, Texas, work 
was temporarily suspended on a well hole and the 
orifice stopped with hay in order to prevent ob- 
structions from débris. Afterwards when the plug 
was withdrawn the hay was found to be imbedded 
in a matrix of sulphur, undoubtedly deposited by 
the escaping gas... . No topographic surveys have 
ever been made of any portion of the Coastal 
Prairie, and hence the slight irregularities of its 
contour are discernible only with difficulty. Until 
Captain Lucas’s investigations, certain low eleva- 
tions which have since become the most important 
features of the landscape were hardly noticed. 
I allude to low swells or hills, such as Spindle Top, 
which occur here and there and now attract atten- 
tion from their supposed relation to the occurrence 
of oil beneath them. ... In the generally monoto- 
nous monoclinal structure there are a few wrinkles 
or small swells likely to escape the eye of even the 
trained observer, and yet of a character which may 
have an important bearing on the oil problem. 
These are the circular or oval mounds already 
described which were first recognized by Captain 
Lucas. When he pointed out Spindle Top hill to 
me, my eye could hardly detect it, for it rises by 
gradual slope only ten feet above the surrounding 
prairie plains. I was still more incredulous when 
he insisted that this mound, only 200 acres in ex- 
tent, was an uplifted dome. But Captain Lucas 
said that I would be convinced of the uplift if I 
could see Damon’s mound in Brazoria County. 
In August, 1901, I visited that place and then 
returned for a second look at Spindle Top and was 
convinced that if these hills are not recent qua- 
quaversal uplifts no other known hypothesis will 
explain them. 
Mr. Marius R. Campbell, a later but im- 
partial judge, in summing up the progress 
that had been made,’ states: 
In the general wave of oil explorations and 
development that swept over the country from the 
Appalachian region, when that was at the height 
of its production, oil was found at Corsicana, Tex., 
in flat-lying rocks that were similar in geologic 
structure to the rocks of the mid-continent field 
? Economic Geology, Vol. VI., No. 4, June, 1911. 
SCIENCE 
963 
of Kansas, and it seems to have been generally 
assumed that there were no new problems in the 
oil fields of the Gulf coast. Captain A. F. Lucas, 
however, was not of this opinion. For years he 
had been exploring the salt beds of Louisana, and 
he appears to have been the first to fully appre- 
ciate the dome structure of such deposits, and to 
have been imbued with the idea that they contained 
not only salt and sulphur but also petroleum. His 
famous gusher on Spindle Top near Beaumont, 
Texas, struck oil January 10, 1901, and fully dem- 
onstrated the correctness of his theory, although 
this was not generally accepted by the geologists 
best acquainted with the field. Some endeavored 
to convince the public that the conditions at 
Spindle Top were similar to those at Corsicana, 
and that the pool would be found to have consid- 
erable lateral extent, but the oil drillers soon dis- 
proved this idea, and showed that oil was prac- 
tically limited to the dome and small mound which 
constituted its topographical expression. 
There are scattered throughout the Texas 
Coastal Plain many well-known domes which 
have been prospected directly or indirectly by 
the writer, the most important of which are 
known as Saratoga, Sour Lake, Big Hill, 
High Island, Damon Mound, Keiser Mound, 
Barber Hill, Hoskins Mound, and Bryan 
Height. In the last-named mound the writer 
found in 1901 hydrogen sulphide under heavy 
pressure and also native sulphur which is now 
being heavily exploited by a New York syndi- 
cate, which hopes to make this equal to the 
sulphur mines of Louisiana. Whether or not 
this mound is also a salt dome remains to be 
proved by deeper drilling. 
In conclusion it appears that the claim 
made by Mr. Harris in locating wells at Pine 
Prairie, as noted in his article in ScmENcE, 
quoted above, was quite premature, as The 
Oil and Gas Journal, of May 23, states: 
Pine Prairie, that had promise of developing 
another Gulf coast field, has so far failed to pro- 
duce other than disappointments. Of the five tests 
now drilling three are at depths considerably past 
that at which the Myles Mineral Company found 
pay in its No. 8, the discovery well, and have 
failed to drill into anything encouraging to test. 
The Producers Oil Company set screens in No. 1 
Le Danois-Hudspeth at about 2,000 feet and made 
a try for a well, but the effort failed to be pro- 
