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rocks of the earth has been a problem beset with many 

 difficulties. That like coal and all other kindred sub- 

 stances it had a vegetable origin most savans have been 

 ready to admit. The first idea which I remember to have 

 heard generally advanced and believed in 1859 and 1860 — 

 when this subject first attracted attention, was that it 

 was the coal tar, which had been given off when the coal 

 formation by heat and pressure was reduced to its present 

 solid condition. But this is inconsistent with the position 

 of many of the oil bearing rocks. Thus that at Enniskillen 

 in Canada is distant hundreds of miles from an} 7 part of the 

 coal formation, and in a geologic formation situated thou- 

 sands of feet below it. It is impossible to conceive that the 

 oil should percolate through all these underlying rocks and 

 diffuse itself through so wide an area. The opinion now 

 generally entertained is that in common with coal it had a 

 vegetable origin ; that the plants growing in the geologic 

 ages when submitted to heat and pressure, had slowly been 

 distilled into these hydrocarbon fluids. Nor is it impossible 

 that the animal tissues embedded in the same rocks should 

 have -undergone a similar transformation. It is quite per- 

 tinent to this question to ask, if these hydrocarbon fluids 

 and gases which are found to escape from the pores of the 

 rocks, are not taken to represent the fatty matter and woody 

 fibre of the animals and plants of these ages, what has be- 

 come of these materials. We know nature does not destroy 

 matter. Where then is the carbon of the plants and ani- 

 mals, whose skeletons have been preserved for us in the 

 rocks ? It does not enter into the constitution of the rocks, 

 it has not been compressed and transformed into coal ; there 

 is in fact no other representation of it in many geologic 

 formations except these oils and gases whose wide distri- 

 bution has only lately become known to us. The exact 

 chemical reactions which have produced this transforma- 

 tion we do not yet know ; neither do we know the processes 

 in nature's laboratory, by which the immense beds of an- 



