As we go farther east history becomes less exact and legend more quaint. In Burma the story of a sweet-smelling deposit of petroleum is the subject of a tale more than a thousand years old. It is related that King Alsungsithu was making progress through his realms with his seven wives and on his magic raft. At one point the ladies went ashore and finding sweet-smelling earth, anointed themselves and delayed so long that they forgot the hour appointed for their return. The angered king issued the decree “let the queens who love scented earth more than me, their Lord, be put to death.” The doomed ladies replied “From too much love of this fragrant earth we must now die. Let it lose its fragrance and become an overflowing stream of foul-smelling oil, and let those who collect it pay us honour as their protecting deities.” They were executed and became Nats or guardian spirits and belief in them is still preserved among workers in the Burmese oil fields. But if the legend could be accepted as true the slain women assuredly took a sad vengeance, for the only offense that can be charged against so beneficent an agent as crude petroleum is its odour, which assuredly belies its virtues. There are the remains of very ancient oil workings in Burma, Japan and China. Indeed, China, a pioneer in many arts, was undoubtedly one in oil production. Boring in the modern sense was unknown to most of the ancient peoples but it was practised in China centuries ago, a fact which will come under consideration when we take up the mechanical phases of oil production. They had some deep wells at a time when other nations were merely utilizing surface accumulations, and eruptions. A natural substance which has played so considerable a part in the literature and legend of Europeans and Asiatics did not fail to appear in the beliefs and practices of the aborigines of this country. From time unknown the red man has gathered and made medicinal use of the surface petroleum of the Oil Creek region of Pennsylvania; and its utility in more than one respect was known to the Indians of California and Mexico. The Senecas imparted to the French Jesuit missionaries--who in the seventeenth century, explored not only Eastern Canada but the Northern States and the Mississippi Valley--the curative virtues of oil; and two hundred years later it was known to the settlers of Northern New York State, Pennsylvania and Ohio as “Seneca Oil.” The early Spanish missionaries to Mexico and California found the natives selling in their market places petroleum gathered from the surface of the water along the seashore, chiefly for burning purposes. Father Acosta, one of the early missionaries to Peru, noted petroleum floating in the water off Cape Blanco and, as early as 1692, the Spanish Government granted concessions for the collection of Peruvian oil.