172 I. C, WHITE HISTORY 01'^ PETROLEUM AND NATURAL GAS 



who lived in the third century B. C, has described this bitumen from 

 the Springs of Hit, on the Euphrates, and has also told of its use in 

 the construction of mosaics, pavements, etcetera, in the beautiful palaces 

 and temples of ancient Nineveh and Babylon, 



Herodotus, who lived 2,400 years ago, has related how asphaltic oil was 

 produced in his day from a lake on the island of Zante, in the Mediter- 

 ranean, ofE the coast of Greece, by swabbing it up with a branch of 

 myrtle, very much like the early settlers of the Allegheny and Little 

 Kanawha valleys of Pennsylvania and West Virginia collected petroleum 

 from the surface of water with wooden cloths; so that in the primitive 

 methods of procuring mineral oil there is apparently "nothing new 

 under the sun." Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century B. C, has 

 described the deposits of bitumen in Albania, along the eastern shores 

 of the Adriatic Sea, while Pliny and Dioscorides, who lived in the first 

 century of the Christian era, have given an account of the oil springs of 

 the island of Sicily and the use of petroleum in lamps under the name of 

 "Sicilian oil." Many ancient writers and travelers, like Plutarch, 

 Strabo, Marco Polo, and others, have recorded the use of "rock oil" and 

 pitch in Arabia, Persia, India, and elsewhere from the earliest historic 

 periods. 



Eeligious Cult founded on natural Gas Springs 



One of the nearly extinct religious cults, that of the Fire Worshipers, 

 or Parsees, was founded on the mystery which the priesthood of that 

 religion threw around the perpetual fire maintained on the altars of 

 their temples with natural gas. When your speaker visited Baku, on 

 the shore of the Caspian Sea, in 1897, he saw the ruins of one of these 

 mystic shrines, the last of whose priests had disappeared only tweiity- 

 odd years before. In dismantling the altar of this ancient structure, 

 it was discovered that it had been built over a fissure in the earth from 

 which natural gas issued, and that a secret pipe conducted the gas from 

 the fissure to the altar, where its lambent flames had inspired the Fire 

 Worshipers with a belief in the supernatural powers of the priests of 

 Zoroaster, It is possible that similar tricks of deception have imposed 

 on the credulity of mankind during the childhood of the race in the 

 establishment of other primitive religious beliefs. 



Antiquity of Use in China and Japan 



In China, whose civilization has remained practically unchanged for 

 so many centuries, crude methods of using natural gas were practiced 



