It was in 1905 that I first visited Tampico. I was the guest of Mr. Robinson, and as we looked out, one day, over the marshes along the river which runs past Tampico to the sea, six miles away, he told me of his dreams for his port, of the day when not only the Tampico side of the river, but the barren jungle on the other bank would be lined with wharves and great steamers, greater than any of the coasters and tramps that to the number of half a dozen a month were then carrying coal and ore and, amusingly enough as we look back on it now, crude oil from Pennsylvania for use in Tampico’s one industrial establishment, the Waters-Pierce Refinery. I visited Tampico twice again, the last time in 1908. And then this year! It was as if the dream of the builder of the port had come true since the setting of yesterday’s sun. To-day the river is lined, from its mouth all the six miles to Tampico and above, with wharves and warehouses and hundreds of great tanks of oil, and throughout all this length are ships, tankers and cargo boats, while on the hills above are refineries and modern towns, and at night the lights are like those of great cities. The dream, indeed, of a builder of civilization, of civilized Mexico, has apparently come true. A. A. Robinson is gone, laid away with his honors and his vision these four years. But still there is that other American, who twenty years ago rode off into the jungles of the coastal plain, saw with his own eyes the thick, slimy puddles of asphalt at Ebano, and there drilled his first wells. Years later, after his railway contracts were abrogated, seeking lighter, better oils, Mr. Doheny went, with the frontiersman’s unquenchable optimism, nearly a hundred miles farther into the jungle till he heard the unforgettable baby murmur and saw the unforgettable bubbling spring of viscous black oil of the great seepages of Cerro Azul, and there located what was to become the greatest oil well in the history of the world, the Cerro Azul No. 4. Oil is the most fascinating of all the treasures of earth. No geologist has ever approached the solution of either its source or the contours or formations within which it lies. An oil spring such as that wonderful bubbling pool at Cerro Azul may mean the presence of a great reservoir of oil directly beneath or it may mean that the oil has come a dozen or fifty or a hundred miles along a crack in the mother-rock. Experience, faith, intuition, these determine the location of a well. It was these factors that Doheny brought with him to Mexico, for the fields which he finally drilled and proved had been rejected by many geologists before he came and after.