Can they be wrong, who think the stingy soul That grudges honest toil its scanty dole Not worth its weight in slaty, sulphur coal? Whether petroleum, which literally signifies “rock-oil,” be of mineral, vegetable or animal origin matters little to the producer or consumer, who views it from a commercial standpoint. In its natural state it is a variable mixture of numerous liquid hydro-carbons, holding in solution paraffine and solid bitumen, or asphaltum. The fountains of Is, on the Euphrates, were familiar to the founders of Babylon, who secured indestructible mortar for the walls of the city by pouring melted asphaltum between the blocks of stone. These famous springs attracted the attention of Alexander, Trajan and Julian. Even now asphaltum procured from them is sold in the adjacent villages. The commodity is skimmed off the saline and sulphurous waters and solidified by evaporation. The ancient Egyptians used another form of the same substance in preparing mummies, probably obtaining their supplies from a spring on the Island of Zante, described by Herodotus. It was flowing in his day, it is flowing to-day, and a citizen of Boston owns the property. Wells drilled near the Suez canal in 1885 found petroleum. So the gay world jogs on. Mummified Pharaohs are burned as fuel to drive locomotives over the Sahara, while the Zantean fount whose oil besmeared “the swathed and bandaged carcasses” is purchased by a Massachusetts bean-eater! Yet victims of “that tired feeling” turn to namby-pamby novels of the Laura-Jean-Libby brand for real romance! “For truth is strange, stranger than fiction.”