From the mountains of western Pennsylvania into the very ocean bed of the Pacific and even beyond and into the broken strata of upturned Alaska, the oil prospector bored with his sharp tooth of steel and found oil. Hardly has one field fallen into a decline when another has come rushing into service. Only three years ago and all hopes were centered in Oklahoma, and then came Kansas, and then the turn went south again to Texas, and now it looks toward Louisiana. Geologists have estimated and estimated, and they do not differ widely, for few give more than thirty years of life to the petroleum sands of this country if the present yield is insisted upon. And yet there is so much of mystery in the hiding of this strange subterranean liquid that honest men will not say but that it will become a permanent factor in the world of light, heat, and power. If this is not so we are a fatuous people, for with every fifth man in the country the owner of an automobile and the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars for roads fit only for their use, and with ships by the hundred specially constructed to burn oil, we have surely given a large fortune in pledge of our faith that our pools of petroleum will not soon be drained dry, or that others elsewhere will come to our help. In 1908 the country's production of oil was 178,500,000 barrels, and there was a surplus above consumption of more than 20,000,000 barrels available to go into storage. In 1918, 10 years later, the oil wells of the United States yielded 356,000,000 barrels--nearly twice the yield of 1908--but to meet the demands of the increased consumption more than 24,000,000 barrels had to be drawn from storage. The annual fuel-oil consumption of the railroads alone has increased from 16-2/3 to 36-3/4 million barrels; the annual gasoline production from 540,000,000 gallons in 1909 to 3,500,000,000 gallons in 1918. This reference to the record of the past may be taken not only as justifying the earlier appeal for Federal action, but as warranting deliberate attention to the oil problem of to-day. Fuel oil, gasoline, lubricating oil--for these three essentials are there no practical substitutes or other adequate sources? The obvious answer is in terms of cost; the real answer is in terms of man power. Whether on land or sea, fuel oil is preferred to coal because it requires fewer firemen, and back of that, in the man power required in its mining, preparation, and transportation the advantage on the side of oil is even greater. So, too, the substitute for gasoline in internal-combustion engines, whether alcohol or benzol, means higher cost and larger expenditure of labor in its production. There are large bodies of public land now withdrawn, which, under the new leasing bill which seems so near to final passage after seven years of struggle and baffled hope, will in all likelihood make a further rich contribution to the American supply. OIL SHALE.