rmation that it had been "pumped up with salt water about four
hundred feet below the earth's surface." His labels also contained the
convincing picture of an artesian well--a rough woodcut which really
laid the foundation of the Standard Oil Company.

In the late fifties Mr. George H. Bissell had become interested in rock
oil, not as an embrocation and as a cure for most human ills, but as a
light-giving material. A professor at Dartmouth had performed certain
experiments with this substance which had sunk deeply into Bissell's
imagination. So convinced was this young man that he could introduce
petroleum commercially that he leased certain fields in western
Pennsylvania and sent a specimen of the oil to Benjamin Silliman, Jr.,
Professor of Chemistry at Yale. Professor Silliman gave the product
a more complete analysis than it had ever previously received and
submitted a report which is still the great classic in the scientific
literature of petroleum. This report informed Bissell that the
substance, could be refined cheaply and easily, and that, when refined,
it made a splendid illuminant, besides yielding certain byproducts, such
as paraffin and naphtha, which had a great commercial value. So far,
Bissell's enterprise seemed to promise success, yet the great problem
still remained: how could he obtain this rock oil in amounts large
enough to make his enterprise a practical one? A chance glimpse of
Kier's label, with its picture of an artesian well, supplied Bissell
with his answer. He at once sent E. L. Drake into the oil-fields with
a complete drilling equipment, to look, not for saltwater, but for oil.
Nothing seems quite so obvious today as drilling a well into the rock
to discover oil, yet so strange was the idea in Drake's time that the
people of Titusville, where he started work, regarded him as a lunatic
and manifested a hostility to his enterprise that delayed operations for
several months. Yet one day in August, 1859, the coveted liquid began
flowing from "Drake's folly" at the rate of twenty-five barrels a day.

Because of this performance Drake has gone down to fame as the man
who "discovered oil." In the sense that his operation made petroleum
available to the uses of mankind, Drake was its discoverer, and his
achievement seems really a greater one than that of the men who first
made apparent our beds of coal, iron, copper, or even gold. For Drake
really uncovered an entirely new substance. And the countr