RUSSIA.--Long before the commercial value of petroleum and its products was established, Baku--the present centre of the Russian petroleum industry--had become famous for its “Eternal Fires,” and it was to that place the Parsees made pilgrimages for over 1,000 years; in fact, centuries before the Russians occupied the Caucasus, the tribes of Persia eagerly sought the oils of Baku for their curative qualities. The Russian oil-fields have an output of, approximately, 10,000,000 tons annually, or, roughly, 15 per cent. of the world’s total production of crude oil. Since the time when the petroleum industry was placed upon a commercial footing, the Russian fields have produced 230,000,000 tons of petroleum. Enormous though this quantity is, it has been more than doubled by the United States. The oil-fields of Baku have gained a distinction for the reason that numerous individual wells have given forth a flood of crude oil which has, with very few exceptions, been unknown in other petroliferous regions. The Baku fields proper embrace the districts of Balakhany, Saboontchi, Romany, and Bibi Eibat: the first three districts stand on a plateau but a few miles from Baku, while Bibi Eibat is located quite near the Caspian Sea, on a bay from which the field takes its name. One remarkable feature of these fields--as showing their prolific oil content--is that the four main oil-producing districts in Baku have an area of less than 4,000 acres. It is in this locality that the Russian petroleum industry, having had its birth, became centred, and though it is known that there are several really promising oil areas in this south-western part of the Caucasus, the fact that the lands belong to the State has been a sufficient stumbling-block to development in the past. Apart from the Baku fields, the most highly developed oil-field of importance in Russia is that of Grosny, which is situated on the northern slopes of the Caucasian range and connected with the Vladicaucas railway by a branch line. The Grosny field, however, has only been developed during the past fifteen years in what may be called a commercial sense, but its operated area is almost double that of Baku. It has greatly suffered owing to the inadequacy of transport facilities, but in 1919 a project was drafted to build a pipe-line to the Black Sea.