Kerosene for lighting purposes has some advantages over gas or electricity. The light produced from it is steady; therefore it is less harmful to the eyes than the flickering light of illuminating gas, and even better than the electric light. It is far cheaper than either. It has a third advantage, since it can be used in a hand lamp which can be carried from place to place. A large portion of our population consider it so valuable that they would rather give up the gaslight altogether, or indeed the electric light, than be obliged to lose the kerosene lamp. Kerosene is a form of petroleum which is obtained from the earth by deep wells. It is only within the last fifty years that this oil has been pumped in sufficient quantities to make it a valuable industry, though petroleum was obtained here and there in small quantities far back in the early ages. It seems a little singular that the people of Japan and Persia should have dug oil wells centuries ago. Herodotus, who wrote history five hundred years before Christ, tells us of the springs of Zante, one of the Ionian Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, from which oil flowed. It is said that these springs are still flowing. China seems to have been the first country to draw oil from artesian wells. We proud Americans are accustomed to think ourselves a little ahead of all other people. When an American boy in San Francisco, for instance, meets a Chinese lad, he is quite apt to look down upon him and to think that this little Chinese boy came from a country hardly civilized and certainly far behind the "universal Yankee nation;" yet we are constantly finding traces of a civilization in China much earlier than our own. The first successful oil well in this country was made by Col. E. L. Drake, near Titusville, Pennsylvania. In 1854 the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company was organized for the purpose of procuring petroleum in Oil Creek. Four years later this company employed Colonel Drake to drill an artesian well. On the 29th of August, 1859, he "struck oil" only sixty-nine feet below the surface of the ground. The next day this well was found to be nearly full of petroleum. Oil is now found in large quantities in various sections of Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, and Kentucky, and it has recently been discovered in California, Wyoming, Colorado, and other portions of our land. The largest part of the oil used in commerce is from Pennsylvania. At the present time more than fifty million barrels of petroleum are produced annually in the United States alone, which is more than half of the entire product of the world. A single well has been known to yield forty thousand gallons a day, flowing freely without the slightest use of pumping apparatus.