The geographical distribution of petroleum is, as has been said, world-wide, and the oil prospector, followed by the capitalist, who make these discoveries available to the world, are constantly opening up new fields. Oil discoveries necessarily mean great commercial expansion for the localities in which they occur; and no small part of the enormous wealth of the United States has resulted both from the abundance of our deposits of crude, and from the manifold uses to which they have been applied in the improvement and standardization of manufacture. Though the United States is the greatest oil producing country in the world, production on modern commercial and scientific lines first began across the seas, in the little Kingdom of Roumania. There the industry in a modern sense had its birth in 1857. The United States entered the field by virtue of the Pennsylvania discoveries in 1859, and the original industry has attained enormous proportions through later discoveries in such scattered portions of our country as California, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Texas. Italy was the third entrant in the field of organized production in 1860, but her industry has never assumed large proportions. Other countries became producers in the following order: Canada, Russia, Galicia (then Austrian, now Polish), Japan, Germany, India (Burma), Dutch East Indies, Peru and Mexico. The Mexican industry dates back only to 1907 and that country is now recognized as one of the world’s greatest fields. In the United States when we speak of benzine, gasoline and naphtha we allude to the more volatile distillates of petroleum. Lamp oil, as it is called in England, and kerosene or coal oil, as it is known in America, constitutes another product. While petroleum refining is conducted primarily for the production of motor fuel, illuminating oil, lubricants, wax, gas oil, and fuel oil, of various grades, there are a host of specialty products obtained from petroleum which go into use in almost every phase of human activity. These include pharmaceutical preparations for internal and external use, in the form of medicinal oils, ointments, salves, and soaps; cements, including binders for briquetted fuels, water-proofing and saturating agents; special solvents, used to some extent in all chemical laboratories; and an imposing list of rare chemicals, such as higher alcohols of the nature of fusel-oil, and a large variety of organic sulphur compounds. The word “naphtha” comes from Russia, where it is applied to all crude petroleum, and was supposedly derived from the Persian, nafata, to exude. Early Roman writers like Strabo and Pliny, who were acquainted with the burning and lighting properties of the surface oil deposits known to the ancients, spoke of it as bitumen and liquidum candidum. And other terms in Roman and Greek literature obviously signify the same substance.