10 University Geological Survey of Kansas. 
cessful results attained opened up a new era in the oil-fields, 
by the appearance of fountains, or what the Americans term 
‘gushers.’ The common occurrence of fountains, which fol- 
lowed the introduction of the drill, totally demoralized the 
Baku petroleum industry for a time, and the price of crude 
oil fell to about one-eighth of its former cost on the striking 
of the first ‘gushing’ well. The tapping of deeper oil strata, 
which it had been impossible to reach by hand-dug wells, re- 
sulted in the outrush of petroleum in quantities hitherto un- 
precedented in the world’s history, and the verity of the reports 
which reached England and America concerning the Baku 
‘vushers’ was for many years doubted, if not disbelieved. 
“The Brothers Nobel, two engineers of Swedish extraction, 
who were destined to revolutionize the whole oil industry of 
Russia, opened a small refinery in Baku in 1875, where they 
employed their undoubted talents in building up a modern re- 
fining plant by introducing a number of Western ideas. Rob- 
ert and Ludwig Nobel were far-sighted enough to see the 
possibilities that lay in the petroleum industry, and they not 
only exerted their remarkable commercial abilities in the op- 
erations of producing and refining, but they took the neces- 
sary steps to secure a market for their goods in the Russian 
centers—a point which had till then been quite neglected by 
the Baku refiners. In a few years the Brothers Nobel, with 
the assistance of money already in the family, laid the founda- 
tion of an enterprise that eventually became one of the great- 
est industrial concerns in Europe, and they were for a time re- 
fining and distributing about one-half of the total production 
of oil from the Baku fields.” 
America. 
Oil development in America has an interesting history; in- 
teresting partly because it did not follow lines which, looked 
at from our present standpoint, one would have expected. It 
seems that the human mind was not capable of grasping the 
great industrial importance of oil and gas, and that the real 
development for commercial purposes was delayed until Mr. 
George H. Bissell and others comprehended in a measure the 
wonderful possibilities of petroleum, could it be found in suffi- 
cient quantities. Mr. J. J. McLaurin, from whose admirable 
book, Sketches in Crude Oil, quotations have already been 
made, gives the development of petroleum in America in such 
a graphic and entertaining manner that liberty will be taken 
again to make extensive quotations from him. 
“The earliest printed reference to petroleum in America 
is by Joseph de la Roche D’Allion, a Franciscan missionary 
who crossed the Niagara river from Canada in 1629 and wrote 
