February 12, 1886.] 



SCIENCE. 



149 



becoming her 'lord and master.' The first kind 

 was common at the time of Mohammed, and was 

 with difficulty, if at all, abolished by him. Under 

 it, as well as under Beena marriage, kinship could 

 have been reckoned only through females. Before 

 Baal marriage was established, a kind of Thibetan 

 polyandry had prevailed, which he /calls Baal 

 polyandry, in which the husbands were all of one 

 stock. From this arose the habit of acknowledging 

 kinship through males. This Baal polyandry had 

 grown out of the custom of marriage by capture, 

 which was older than that of marriage by pur- 

 chase, and continued after the latter custom had 

 sprung up. In Baal marriage, of course, whether 

 constituted by capture or by contract, the children 

 would be regarded as belonging to the blood of 

 the father. 



We regret that we cannot allude to many other 

 important subjects, especially that of the pro- 

 hibited degrees, from which useful light may be 

 derived upon the problems of early kinship, as 

 well as to numerous excursuses in the notes upon 

 interesting archeological topics. We can only 

 refer general students of early society, as well as 

 all who are interested in old Arabia, to this 

 valuable work, which, having been expanded and 

 rewritten from a cOurse of university lectures 

 delivered in 1885, contains the last word in the 

 important controversy of which we have attempted 

 to sketch the outline. H. W. H. 



THE OIL-WELLS OF BAKU. 



Baku is a seaport town of the Apsheron penin- 

 sula, in the Caspian Sea, in the most southern part 

 of the Russian territory. The adjacent region has 

 long attracted the attention of the surrounding- 

 nations, on account of the naphtha with which the 

 soil is impregnated. The inflammable gases issu- 

 ing from the ground rendered the locality sacred in 

 the eyes of the Parsees, or fire-worshippers, who 

 have long resorted to it from distant places. The 

 peninsula is an arid waste ; and one of the most 

 serious difficulties encountered is the scarcity of 

 water, both for mechanical and dietetic uses. The 

 centre of the oil-industry, according to F. Vasilieff , 

 as given in the Proceedings of the Institution of 

 civil engineers, does not exceed four and a half 

 square miles in area, which forms, indeed, the 

 centre of the whole oil-bearing region of the 

 Caucasus. 



The earliest oil-wells date back for centuries. A 

 Persian inscription has been found which fixes the 

 date of one of them at 1594. After the cession of 

 the country to the Russians in 1813, the oil- 

 industry was under the control of the govern- 

 ment, and up to 1873 the entire revenue derived 



from this source did not exceed fifty thousand 

 dollars. The manufacture of kerosene commenced 

 in 1858, after which the industry began to develop 

 slowly ; but within the last fifteen years it has in- 

 creased with greater activity. At that time land 

 was sold at auction, and brought as high as five 

 thousand dollars per acre. The old crude methods 

 and shallow wells were abandoned, and at present 

 there are more than five hundred borings. The 

 yield has now reached a million tons per annum. 



The naphtha-bearing strata, three of which are 

 so far known, belong to the lower miocene forma- 

 tion. They dip at an angle of from 20° to 40°, 

 and are composed of sand, calcareous clays, marls, 

 and in places compact sandstone, often of great 

 thickness. Organic remains are wholly absent. 

 The naphtha-bearing sands are in a semi-fluid con- 

 dition, and, when brought to the surface, give off 

 carburetted-hydrogen gas. Not only do these sands 

 give much trouble, but the salt water associated 

 with them makes the driving of bore- wells diffi- 

 cult. 



The plateau is a hundred and forty feet above 

 the surface of the Caspian Sea, and the bores 

 reach as deep as six or seven hundred feet. The 

 depth, however, depends upon the yield and the 

 quality of the oil. At first the oil does not reach 

 high in the borings ; but, as the depth increases, it 

 rises, and at last is forced out by the pent-up 

 gases. 



A naphtha-fountain differs very much from one 

 of water. The oil, on leaving the pipe, is broken 

 up into many jets, which scatter in all directions. 

 The larger part, on account of the liberation of the 

 occluded gases, is shattered into the finest spray. 

 Together with the oil, there is ejected an immense 

 quantity of sand, stones, lumps of clay, some of 

 the pieces being very large. This condition of 

 things is explained by the high pressure of the 

 gases, which has been measured in closed bore- 

 pipes, and found to range between fifty and three 

 hundred pounds per square inch. In the year 

 1883 two fountains played simultaneously to a 

 height of between two hundred and fifty and 

 three hundred and fifty feet. When a fountain 

 breaks out, the boarding of the boring-turret is 

 soon torn off, stones are thrown up to a great 

 height, and it is dangerous to approach the bore, 

 especially from the circumstance that the naphtha 

 spray has an inebriating effect on the workmen. 

 A cloud of naphtha hovers over the fountain, and 

 is carried to great distances by the winds, covering 

 every tiling it passes over with a light film of oil. 

 The sand thrown up forms a hillock round the well, 

 often rising to twenty-eight feet in height. The 

 bursting-forth of a fountain is accompanied by 

 loud noises and a trembling of the earth. Millions 



