CHAPTER I. 
DISCOVERIES OF OIL AND GAS, GEOGRAPHICAL AND 
HISTORICAL. 
By ERASMUS HAWORTH. 
NE of the most difficult facts of history to understand in 
the industrial development of the world is the extreme 
slowness with which the human race really began using 
oil and gas in a commercial way. History fails to record when 
the first discoveries of these hydrocarbons were made by the 
human family. They were known and were used in a small 
way by different peoples scattered almost all over the face of 
the earth long before the times of our early written history. 
Their existence has had a great influence on the human race 
throughout all this time; the oil being used for medicine, some 
grades of tar and asphaltum being used for different kinds of 
cement; and the natural gas exuding from the ground probably 
constituted all or nearly all of the sacred fires worshiped by 
different peoples at different times. 
Yet, with all this knowledge of so long duration, it was not 
until the famous Drake well was drilled in Pennsylvania, in 
1859, that any use, in the modern sense of the term, was made 
of petroleum or any of its products. Mr. J. J. McLaurin, of 
Franklin, Pa., has published a book entitled Sketches in Crude 
Oil, from which a few extracts may well be taken to set forth 
some of the earlier discoveries of oil. 
ue . The fountains of Is, on the Euphrates, were fa- 
miliar ‘to the founders of Babylon, who secured indestructible 
mortar for the walls of the city by pouring melted asphaltum 
between the blocks of stone. These famous springs attracted 
the attention of Alexander, Trajan and Julian. Even now 
asphaltum procured from them is sold in the adjacent villages. 
The commodity is skimmed off the saline and sulphurous 
waters and solidified by evaporation. The ancient Egyptians 
used another form of the same substance in preparing mum- 
mies, probably obtaining their supplies from a spring on the 
Island of Zanta, described by Herodotus. : 
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