474 PETROLEUM IN EUROPE. 
already beginning to bring tools and money, and that is all that is 
needed. 
The distance between the widest points of the region is nearly 125 
miles, and the width from the north to the south is about thirty-one 
miles. The surface is about 2,500,000 acres, but there are only twenty- 
five works for extraction, most of which have been established within 
the last three or four years. The reservoirs afterwards descend from 
Drohobyez towards Moldavia, taking the direction of the north-west to 
the south-east across Bukowina. We shall soon, it is hoped, have cor- 
rect information on this part of the oil region of the Carpaths, as an 
eminent French professor is now examining it. 
When we observe the distribution of the deposits of Galicia and 
"Bukowina, and their general direction across Moldo-Wallachia, we are 
convinced that there is a great subterranean fissure which crosses 
Europe pretty nearly in a line from the mouth of the Oder to the mouth 
of the Danube. Already is this line worked out by the salt deposits of 
Wielieszkr, Bechina, Stravasol, Drohobyez, Delatyn, and Solka. The 
latter place, situated in Bukowina, at a short distance from the 
Moldavian frontier, is remarkable, like Drohobyez, because both salt 
and petroleum are found there. The same is the cause at Stravasol, in 
Galicia. The industrial importance of these facts is considerable. 
There has been much discussion as to the origin of petroleum. In 
America it was first thought that this substance was produced by the 
dissolution of the coal and bituminous schists ; but this- hypothesis has 
had to be abandoned as insufficient. The decomposition of vegetable 
tissues, and even of the bodies of gelatinous animals in the geological 
epochs, has also been considered the cause of petroleum and bitumen 
which are discovered in the four parts of the world, and the circum- 
stances which have occurred during the search for, and the working of, 
the wells of America, do not permit this second explanation to be 
accepted as sufficient. 
It is highly probable that there are great subterranean reservoirs, fed 
by the bituminous dejectives which come from the centre of the earth. 
In other words, that there are still eruptions of bitumen, as there are 
saline, sulphurous, and other eruptions. The petroleum which we collect 
comes, therefore, to us, in great part, from the interior, and not from 
the superficies of the terrestrial crust. 
When petroleum is found in recent formations, as in Galicia, it is 
almost at 100 to 105 feet in depth, in wells which have to be sunk. The 
oil must be got out either by buckets or a pump. But in America, 
after emptying such reservoirs, strata, from which the oil springs to the 
surface, have been found. In some cases they have been reached by 
borings to a great depth. In the part of Europe, however, of which we 
are speaking, the upper reservoirs are in basins of rock. This rock is 
impenetrable but between clefts in it it is probable that the lower sheets 
