New York Paper - The Origin of Petroleum (with Discussion)

Apart from the hypothesis of a cosmic origin (which failed of acceptance because it was not adequately supported by facts), the only important controversy concerning the origin of petroleum has been, for a long time, between the advocates of inorganic and of organic origin respectively. Each of these theories has had a long history of development, and is still being perfected, under the influence of two causes: (1) the increasingly extensive and thorough study of the oil-fields (of which new examples are periodically discovered and opened); and (2) the progress of synthetic experiments devoted to this question. Moreover, the advance in our physical and chemical knowledge of the properties of this peculiar natural product has necessarily modified all criticism of conflicting views. I. The Hypothesis of Inorganic Origin That the nation of an inorganic origin of petroleum, first set forth by Berthelot in 1866, and afterward ingeniously developed and formulated by Mendelejeff, should thus have proceeded chiefly from chemists, is quite natural; for the question was one of possible chemical processes in the earth's interior, and of imagined chemical reactions to be verified by ex-periment. Hypotheses of this kind were suggested by many chemists, of whom two, P. Sabatier and J. H. Senderens, may be specially named by reason of their highly interesting chemical experiments. Among geologists, Mendelejeff's hypothesis was received at first with much interest and favor; for it rested on the assumption of a central terrestrial mass of iron carbide, and the geologists had good reasons for adopting that assumption. Yet comparatively few of them attempted to furnish geological proofs of the hypothesis: the majority either silently believed in it, or for one or another reason rejected it altogether. An apparently weighty support of Mendelejeff's view was furnished by the American, G. F. Becker, who found in the oil-regions of the United States important and abnormal disturbances of the isogons of terrestrial magnetism, and inferred that in these regions the central iron mass must