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312 ANNUAL REPORT 
~and eastern Ohio, and the product in this field he considered to have been 
obtained from vegetable matter. Other oils, especially those found in 
shales in California, he classed as animal in origin. The different grades 
of oil found in the Appalachian field were in his judgment the result of 
fractional distillation, and natural gas was an incidental product. The 
great reservoirs in these states he thought were produced in rocks lying 
much below those which now contain them. : 
Phillips assigns a vegetable origin to petroleum, claiming that the 
change has taken place under water, and hence in the absence of air. The 
first changes were relatively rapid, and the later one, which is directly 
responsible for the petroleum, much slower. Apparently this theory does 
not require great heat. 
Newberry has published an elaborate theory to explain the origin of 
the oil and gas in the Appalachian field. He makes the source the plant 
remains in the great shales lying in the Lower Carboniferous and upper 
Devonian formations, the products rising to the horizon where now found. 
That these shales contain a large quantity of organic matter has long been 
known. By distilling the Huron shales of Ohio from 10 to 20 gallons of 
oil per ton can be secured. These shales have often a great thickness and 
cover a very large area, and hence must contain a vast quantity of hydro- 
carbon compounds. 
Newberry does not appear to use the term distillation in the ordinary 
sense. This, as is well known, requires a high temperature. Thus Engel 
in the work on Menhaden oil already referred to, began with a tempera- 
ture of 320 degrees C. under a pressure of 10 atmospheres, and later in- 
creased the heat to 400 degrees C., at the same time decreasing the 
pressure to 4 atmospheres. Newberry, however, thought that the changes 
took place at low temperatures. 
Dr. Orton has written elaborately on the subject. He considered both 
petroleum and natural gas to have been derived from: organic matter, 
animals in some cases, plants in others. This could be determined, he 
thought, by the nature of the product; thus the petroleum and natural 
gas of northwestern Ohio contain sulphur and nitrogen compounds, and 
so have been derived from animal matter. He held the same view of the 
small quantity of oil derived from the Cincinnati and Utica shales in Ohio 
and the shale oil of California. 
The oil and gas in the great Appalachian field, on the other hand, he 
considered of vegetable origin, making as the source plants found in the 
great shales underlying the oil and gas bearing formation. In Ohio these 
would be principally the Ohio shales (Devonian) and the Cuyahoga shales 
(Sub-Carboniferous). The changes were made without high tem- 
perature. 7 : 
Kraemer and Spilker in 1899 announced the results of experiments on 
an ooze found beneath a bed of peat lying north of Berlin. The ooze has 
