12 



TOPOGEAPHY OP THE 



negro that had been hung up hj the heels before a slow fire. It is perhaps 

 needless to say that there is nothing whatever in the mode of occurrence of 

 the Punjab oil, to uphold the chimerical belief that rock oil ever passes by dis- 

 tillation, emanation, or otherwise, from one set of rocks to another, that it origi- 

 nates in any different rocks from those in which it is found ; and nothing to show 

 that it has been formed by any other method than the very natural and sufficient one 

 of the low decomposition of organic matter, deposited along with the other. materials 

 of the rock. JN'either is there anything to show that the oil has been driven by the 

 upward pressure of water, from the lower parts of a bed of rock through its pores to 

 a higher part of the same bed ; on the contrary, as the rocks near most of the oil 

 springs dip pretty steeply, if such an action of water were possible, all the oil would 

 long ago have been altogether forced out of the rock at the outcrop. Indeed, such 

 an idea is quite inconsistent with the fact that even a slight amount of oiliness in the 

 pores of a body is a complete bar to the entrance of water ; much less could water 

 (without soap) scour the oil from one mass of rock and make it flow into another 

 mass filled with moisture. If oil wells are more numerous in some regions along the 

 tops of rock saddles, the reason is clear, that the oil-bearing bed lies too deep for 

 boring conveniently elsewhere. 



Wild hopes have sometimes been entertained that a lai-ge amount of oil might by 

 boring near the oil springs be struck in some cavity below the oil-bearing bed ; but 

 it is safe to say that they are not justified by anything whatever, either in the Punjab 

 or in any other part of the world, either in the practical experience of oil boring or 

 in the general laws of plij^sics. ' - . - ■ ■ ' ; • ^ ' 



2. ' Sidt.—In the lower part of the Devonian rocks there are large deposits of salt 

 from white to brick red in color, in layers of about two feet thick, separated by thin 

 (half-inch) layers of red marl, amounting in all to a hundred feet or more. It is 

 mined especially at Keora (in one place in a chamber thirty or forty feet wide and 

 high,) and at other places near Pind Dadun Khan, and on both sides of the Indus 

 near Kalabagh. There are other like deposits of salt, perhaps of the same age, west 

 of the Indus, twenty-five miles north of Kalabagh. 



3. Plaster, — Gypsum is found in beds as much as thirteen feet thick or more, and 

 in thin seams in the Devonian salt marl in the Salt Range, especially near the salt 

 mines ; and is commonly fight gray and mottled in color, sometimes pure white, pink, 

 brown or greenish, sometimes crystalline. It is also found in a mass of perhaps 

 20,000 tons at the Chhota Kutta oil springs, and in one of perhaps 200,000 tons near 

 the Punnoba oil springs, and in some quantity at Loone kee Kussee sulphur pits 

 opposite Dundee on the Indus; in each of these cases apparently altered from line 



