symptom of greasiness in the well, from which wondrous results were anticipated on account of the “spring.” One day’s hand-pumping produced twelve barrels of oil and so much water that an engine was required to pump steadily. By January twentieth, 1861, the engine was puffing and the well producing moderately, the influx of water diminishing the yield of oil. These four, with two getting under way on the Buchanan farm, north of the McClintock, and one on the J. W. McClintock tract, the site of Petroleum Centre, summed up all the wells actually begun on Oil Creek in 1859. Three of the four were “kicked down” by the aid of spring-poles, as were hundreds later in shallow territory. This method afforded a mode of development to men of limited means, with heavy muscles and light purses, although totally inadequate for deep drilling. An elastic pole of ash or hickory, twelve to twenty feet long, was fastened at one end to work over a fulcrum. To the other end stirrups were attached, or a tilting platform was secured by which two or three men produced a jerking motion that drew down the pole, its elasticity pulling it back with sufficient force, when the men slackened their hold, to raise the tools a few inches. The principle resembled that of the treadle-board of a sewing-machine, operating which moves the needle up and down. The tools were swung in the driving-pipe or the “conductor”—a wooden tube eight or ten inches square, placed endwise in a hole dug to the rock—and fixed by a rope to the spring-pole two or three feet from the workmen. The strokes were rapid and a sand-pump—a spout three inches in diameter, with a hinged bottom opening inward and a valve working on a sliding-rod, somewhat in the manner of a syringe—removed the borings mainly by sucking them into the spout as it was drawn out quickly. Horse-power, in its general features precisely the kind still used with threshing-machines, was the next step forward. Steam-engines, employed for drilling at Tidioute in September of 1860, reduced labor and expedited work. The first pole-derricks, twenty-five to thirty-five feet high, have been superseded by structures that tower seventy-two to ninety feet. [Illustration: “KICKING DOWN” A WELL.]