“It is not a farthing glim in a bedroom.”—_Charles Reade._ “The west glimmers with some streaks of day.”—_Shakespeare._ “Even the night shall be light about me.”—_Psalms cxxxix: 11._ ---------- The Land Columbus ran against, by anticipating Horace Greeley’s advice to “Go West,” was not neglected in the unstinted distribution of petroleum. It abounds in South America, in the West Indies, the United States and Canada. The most extensive and phenomenal natural fountain of petroleum ever known is on the Island of Trinidad. Hot bitumen has filled a basin four miles in circumference, three-quarters of a mile from the sea, estimated to contain the equivalent of ten-millions of barrels of crude-oil. The liquid boils up continually, observing no holidays or Sundays, seething and foaming at the center of the lake, cooling and thickening as it recedes, and finally becoming solid asphaltum. The bubbling, hissing, steaming caldron emits a sulphurous odor, perceptible for ten or twelve miles and decidedly suggestive of the orthodox Hades. Humboldt in 1799 reported his impressions of this spontaneous marvel, in producing which the puny hand of man had no share. From it is derived the dark, tough, semi-elastic material, first utilized in Switzerland for this purpose, which paves the streets of scores of cities. Few stop to reflect, as they glide over the noiseless surface on whirling bicycles or behind prancing steeds, that the smooth asphaltum pavements and the clear “water-white” in the piano-lamp have a common parentage. Yet bloomers and pantaloons, twin-creations of the tailor, or diamonds and coal, twin-links of carbon, are not related more closely. “Even men and monkeys may be kin.” The earliest printed reference to petroleum in America is by Joseph de la Roche D’Allion, a Franciscan missionary who crossed the Niagara river from Canada in 1629 and wrote of oil, in what is now New York, known to the Indians and by them given a name signifying “plenty there.” Likely this was the petroleum occupying cavities in fossils at Black Rock, below Buffalo, in sufficient abundance to be an object of commerce. Concerning the celebrated oil-spring of the Seneca Indians near Cuba, N. Y., which D’Allion may also have seen, Prof. Benjamin Silliman in 1833 said: