HAWORTH. | Discoveries of Oil and Gas. i 
dered the development of the Roumanian region. Southern 
Australia is blessed with bituminous shales, resembling those 
in Scotland, good for sixty gallons of petroleum to the ton. 
The New Zealanders obtained a meager supply from the hill- 
sides, collecting carefully the droppings from the interior 
rocks, and several test-wells have resulted satisfactorily. The 
unsophisticated Sumatrans . . ._ stick pipes in rocks and 
hills that trickle petroleum and let the liquid drop upon their 
heads until their bodies are sleek and slippery as an eel. . 
“The Rangoon district of India long yielded 400,000 hogs- 
heads annually, the Hindoos using the oil to heal diseases, to 
preserve timber and to cremate corpses. Burma has been sup- 
plied from this source for an unknown period. The liquid, 
which is of a greenish-brown color and resembles lubricating- 
oil in density, gathers in pits sunk twenty to ninety feet in beds 
of sandy clays overlying slates and sandstones. Clumsy pots 
or buckets, operated by quaint windlasses, hoist the oil slowly 
to the mouth of the pits, whence it is carried across the coun- 
try in leathern bags borne on men’s shoulders, or in earthen 
jars packed into carts drawn by oxen. Major Michael Symes, 
ambassador to the court of Ava in 1765, published a narrative 
of his sojourn, in which is this passage: 
“We rode until two o’clock, at which hour we reached 
Yaynangheomn, or Petroleum creek. . . . The smell of 
the oil is extremely offensive. It was nearly dark when we 
approached the pits. There seemed to be a great many pits 
within a small compass. Walking to the nearest, we found 
the aperture about four feet square and the sides lined, as far 
as we could see down, with timber. The oil is drawn up in an 
iron pot, fastened to a rope passed over a wooden cylinder, 
which revolves on an axis supported by two upright posts. 
When the pot is filled, two men take hold of the rope by the end 
and run down a declivity, which is cut in the ground, to a dis- 
tance equal to the depth of the well. When they reach the end 
of the track the pot is raised to its proper elevation; the con- 
tents, water and oil together, are discharged into a cistern, and 
the water is afterward drawn through a hole in the bottom. 
When a pit yielded as much as came up to the waist of 
a man it was deemed tolerably productive; if it reached his 
neck it was abundant, and that which reached no higher than 
his knee was accounted indifferent.’ 
“Labor-saving machinery has not forged to the front to any 
great degree in the oil-fields of the East Indies. For the Bur- 
mese trade flatboats ascend the Irrawaddy to Rainanghong, a 
town inhabited almost exclusively by the potters who make the 
earthen jars in which the oil is kept for this peculiar traffic. 
Petroleum in India occurs in middle or lower Ter- 
tiary rock. In the Rawalpindi district of the Panjab it is 
found at sixteen localities. At Gunda a well yielded eleven 
gallons a day for six months, from a boring eighty feet deep, 
