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ORIGIN OF PETROLEUM. © 
it is hard to see; but we may still style our conclusions, even on such 
subjects, probable. 
ORIGIN OF PETROLEUM 
Among the geological probabilities as to petroleum, I mention first 
those which bear upon its origin. Geologists believe that petrolewm is in 
all instances derived from organic matter—that is, they believe that petro- 
leum falls into line with every other combustible body that we know on 
or beneath the crust of the earth. Everything that burns has borrowed 
its power to burn from the sun. It burns because it holds some of the 
sun’s heat and light imprisoned in the organic substances formed by 
these agents. Burning is the rapid restoration of this organic matter to 
the simpler state from which it originally came. 
Yo what other source can petroleum be referred? Weare all familiar 
with the great chemical hypotheses that have been before the world for 
the last 30 or 40 years. The names of their authors are asufficient guar- 
anty of the soundness of the chemical actions and reactions invoked— 
that is, of the chemical possibilities concerned. ‘To one of these theories, 
which has somewhat more to commend it, or, rather, somewhat less to 
condemn it, than the other theories of the same class, the great name of 
Mendelejeff, the discoverer of the periodic law, is attached. In what light 
the postulates of this theory are regarded by chemists I am not able to 
say. These postulates, in substance, involve masses of white-hot iron, 
buried miles below the surface in the depths of the original crust, but 
still reached by water percolating from the surface and charged with 
carbon dioxide, the whole giving rise to a somewhat complicated series 
of chemical reactions out of which petroleum at last emerges. 
I repeat, I do not know how this theory appears to chemists, but to 
geologists it sounds like an echo from the eighteenth century. It goes 
back to Werner's day and takes its place among the ‘‘cloud-capped towers 
and gorgeous palaces ” of the speculations of the time when cataclysmic 
geology was in undisturbed possession of the field. 
The law of parsimony of force seems applicable to this case. It is not 
necessary to go so far as these chemical theories require for a source of 
petroleum, because there is always an organic source nearer at hand. 
We can roughly divide the rocks of the earth’s crust into two great series ; 
those in which organic remains are more or less abundant and those in 
which no traces of life are found, either because life had not been intro- 
duced at the time of their formation or because metamorphic changes 
have supervened since their origin, by reason of which all such traces, 
if ever present, have disappeared. 
