The oil was valuable, but could it be obtained in quantities great enough to make the development of so remote a locality worth while? The only method of obtaining it known to Mr. Bissell and his associates in the new company was from the surface of oil springs. Could it be obtained in any other way? There has long been a story current in the Oil Regions that the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company received its first notion of drilling for oil from one of those trivial incidents which so often turn the course of human affairs. As the story goes, Mr. Bissell was one day walking down Broadway when he halted to rest in the shade of an awning before a drug store. In the window he saw on a bottle a curious label, “Kier’s Petroleum, or Rock-Oil,” it read, “Celebrated for its wonderful curative powers. A natural Remedy; Produced from a well in Allegheny Co., Pa., four hundred feet below the earth’s surface,” etc. On the label was the picture of an artesian well. It was from this well that Mr. Kier got his “Natural Remedy.” Hundreds of men had seen the label before, for it went out on every one of Mr. Kier’s circulars, but this was the first to look at it with a “seeing eye.” As quickly as the bottle of rock-oil in the Dartmouth laboratory had awakened in Mr. Bissell’s mind the determination to find out the real value of the strange substance, the label gave him the solution of the problem of getting oil in quantities—it was to bore down into the earth where it was stored, and pump it up.