Soc. Journ. Aug. 1864), says, "It may be useful to know that rock-oil, petroleum, Barbadoes tar, naphtha, are all varieties of the same material, and that bitumen is the pitch-like residue which remains after the refined oil is distilled from the crude, or has naturally dried away." These are the substances of which collectively the geographical positions are to be noticed.

The notices in old writers of the well-known sources of bitumen on the Euphrates and in Judæa are numerous, and these are the most frequent subjects of reference to these products in later times, till the remarkable naphtha-springs at Bákú on the Caspian, and the striking appearance which they present, came to be more generally known. The soft bitumen in the Euphrates valley is that of which we have the earliest mention*. The word translated "slime" in the English version of Gen. xi. 3, is dopaλros in the LXX. and bitumen in the Vulgate, and this is what is meant. Of the asphalt of the Dead Sea, its quantity, and the magnitude of the masses frequently found, there are many accounts in the writings of ancient and modern travellers †.

The great abundance of the petroleum at Bákú on the Caspian, and the remarkable sight presented by the flaming streams of oil and discharges of gas, have been the subject of many descriptions. One of the chief things of note at Bákú is this emission of inflammable gas or naphtha-vapour, which occurs also in many other parts of the world, with or without the immediate accompaniment of oil-springs. The fire-temple at Bákú has a special interest in connexion with India, not only from its general similarity to that of Jwála-Múkhi near Kangra in the Punjab, but also from the circumstance that the Bákú temple has, for a long time and down to the present day, been, like the other, a place of Hindoo pilgrimage, and maintains a small fraternity of resident Brahmans. The great conflagrations of oil on the surface of the ground have not been constant, and many travellers do not mention them; but they could not fail to have been mentioned by any who had seen them t.

Marco Polo describes the great abundance of the discharges of oil at Bákú, and says that people came from vast distances to fetch it §. Bákú is described by Kaempfer, who was there in January 1684 ||. Just a hundred years later it was visited by Mr. Forster on his journey from India to England. He has given a detailed and interesting account of the place, and of the Iindoo mendicants and merchants who resided there. He mentions that the Hindoo traders there were chiefly from Mooltan, and that they usually embarked at Tatta in Lower Sind, proceeding by sea to Bussora, and thence accompanying the caravans passing into Persia. I made endeavour to ascertain at Mooltan whether there is at the present day any direct intercourse between the Hindoos of that place and Bákú, but could not learn that it is kept up. But it is very possible that enterprising Hindoos from Mooltan who do not return there, and whose movements are not known to their friends, may settle down at Bákú as they do elsewhere. A Punjabee Hindoo died a few years ago at Moscow, regarding whose property in Russia and relations in the Punjab there was some correspondence between the Russian Government and our own in India and in Eugland. Among the Hindoos at the Bákú temple Forster found an old man, a native of Delhi, who had visited all the celebrated temples of northern and southern India, and whom he afterwards met at Astracan. Morier, in 1812, met in Persia a Hindoo entirely alone, returning to Benares from a pilgrimage to Bákú **.

About midway between Kaempfer's time and Forster's, came Jonas Hanway, who gives a description of Bákú, the fire-temple, and the Hindoos, and the great quan

* Herod. i. 179; Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. i. 17; D'Herbelot, Biblioth. Or. 8. v. Hit.

† Strab. vi. 763; Plin. N. H. vii. 13; Joseph. B. J. iv. 8. 4; Tacitus, Hist. v. 6; Maundeville, Rochon, &c.

Bádkú and those fountains of blue flame

That burn into the Caspian."-LALLA ROOKH: The Veiled Prophet.

§ Book I. ch. iii. (vol. i. p. 46, of Col. Yule's edition, 1871). See also note in Marsden's edition.

Amoenit. Exot. p. 274, &c.; Lives of Celebrated Travellers (Colburn's Nat. Libr.), **Second Journey, p. 243.

i. 263.

P. 262, note.

tities of oil, obtained then chiefly from certain islands in the Caspian. Descriptions are given by other old and modern travellers of this oil-region, the copious discharges of the white and black naphtha, the streams of flaming oil on the hill sides, the gas and the fire-temple, and the explosive effects of the ignition of the gas mixed with atmospheric air*. An interesting communication was made in 1868 to the Geographical Society of Paris by Dr. Boerklund on the results of his transCaucasian explorations, in which he describes the naphtha-regions of the Caspian. On the Ile Sacrée, he mentions, not far from the Abscheron peninsula on which stands Bákú, there is now a manufactory of paraffine.

Dr. Boerklund notices also the association of these petroleum-fields with active mud-volcanoes. The connexion of petroleum with eruptions of mud and agitations of the earth's surface is noteworthy and important †. The most complete observations on mud-volcanoes, and the relation of these and similar phenomena to deposits of petroleum, are to be found in Prof. Ansted's paper on the subject communicated to the Royal Institution in May 1866, with immediate reference to the mud-volcanoes of Sicily and the Crimea which he had recently visited. There are mud-volcanoes in other parts of the world, in connexion with which petroleum has not hitherto been found. There are large volcanoes of this kind at Hinglaj near the south coast of Belochistan, which have been visited by a few British officers. So far as I am aware, no signs of petroleum have been found in their neighbourhood; but the country has not been well explored t. The petroleum of Kerman has been noticed by Pottinger §. One of the allied substances, ambergris, has long been a noted product of the adjacent seas.

The similarity of the phenomena shown by mud-volcanoes and gas-springs in the Italian peninsula, in the Caucasus, and in South America, is displayed over great tracts of country in the Chinese Empire ||. The use of the natural fires of petroleum and gas in the province of Shan-Si is described in an old account of the province by a native writer, Dionysius Kao, who says that in all parts of the province are fiery wells, which conveniently serve the people for cooking their victuals. (Possibly the "Temple of the Limit of Fire," mentioned by Fa Hian the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, was a temple over natural gas-flames like those of Bákú and Jwála-Mukhi ¶.) Similar gas-flames on the Caramanian coast are described by Capt. Beaufort as before by Pliny.

**

The country from which the principal supplies of petroleum were obtained in Britain, previous to the discovery of the enormous quantities to be obtained in America by boring, was Burmah. Of the petroleum wells in that country a full account is given in Colonel Yule's 'Narrative of the Mission to the Court of Ava,' and in the notes in the Appendix by Mr. Oldham, Director of the Geological Survey of India. In the Province of Pegu there is a burning hillock called the Nat Mee or Spirit Fire, of which an account is given by Lieut. Duff, Deputy Commissioner of Thyet Myo, in a communication to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, July 1861. The gaseous exhalations at Chittagong, called the Burning Fountains of Brahma, have been described by Turner, and more recently by a writer in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal ††.

There are many other parts of Asia and Europe in which these products, in some of their forms, are found and have long been known. In Assam petroleum is now obtained in considerable quantity by boring. The native petroleums of Southern India and of Australia have been shown in recent local exhibitions. In the interior of Sumatra springs of sulphur and petroleum were discovered in 1869. The petroleum of the north-western parts of the Punjab, known

*Wonders of the East, by Friar Jordanus (Col. Yule's note), p. 50; Hon. G. Keppel's Journey from India to England,' 1824; A Journey from London to Persepolis,' by J. Ussher, 1865; Morier's Journey; Kinneir's Persia,' &c.; Some Years' Travels,' by Tho. Herbert, 1638. + Cosmos, i. 212; Scrope on Volcanoes.

An account of them by Col. A. C. Robertson, 8th Regt., is given in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1849. § P. 312.

|| Humboldt, Cosmos,' iv. 216; Huc, Chinese Empire,' ch. vii.; Davis's 'Chinese,' chap. v.

Beal's 'Buddhist Pilgrims,' ch. xvi. p. 68,

tt Vol. xii. p. 1055.

**Cosmos, i. 210.

and used since an early period, is now being worked. The chief purpose for which it is directly required is the manufacture of gas for one of our large military stations (Rawul-Pindee).

The great vigour and vitality of the flame of petroleum gave it a special value as a material for igneous missiles before the invention of gunpowder. It is only necessary here to notice this application of the mineral oils as indicative of the localities from which the material was probably obtained †. The Levant, the coast of Asia Minor, the Grecian islands, Sicily, and the Caspian, would furnish abundance of this material in some of its forms for the destructive engines and fire-balls used in the Eastern wars and sieges. There is good reason to believe that the Punjab petroleum was applied to a similar purpose by Mahmud, of Ghazni, in one of his engagements near the Indus with the Indian prince Anandpal in the beginning of the 11th century. This question has been discussed in a most interesting note on the early use of gunpowder in India by the late Sir Henry Elliot, in the first volume of his 'Bibliographical Index to the Mohammedan Historians of India' .

The substance called múmia, or múmiái, is held in great estimation as a medicine for both internal and external use. The other substances of the same class are also used for medicinal as well as for other purposes §; but what is called múmia is used for this only. The current belief in the East is that múmia is of animal origin. It is worthy of note that recent researches have led to the conclusion that this is the case with respect to some, at least, of the great deposits of the mineral oils discovered within late years; but the animal origin of múmia is, in Persia and India, believed to be more immediate. That obtained in the shops at Lahore is said to come from Cabul, that is, in a general way it is obtained from or through Afghanistan. Dr. Fryer tells of a place in Persia where it was obtained in his time. Petroleum is abundant in the same quarter now. Another of the substances of this class, ambergris, has at all times been believed to belong, mediately or immediately, to some big animal of the salt water; but the conclusions regarding it are not even now very satisfactory ¶.

The geographical positions in which these various products in some of their forms are found, and in which indications of their existence, or the frequent accompaniments of them, are met with, appear to be sufficiently varied. They occur in great river-basins, in those of the Euphrates, the Indus and its tributaries, the Brahmaputra, the Irawádi; of the St. Lawrence in Upper and Lower Canada, the Ohio and Mississippi in the States of Ohio, Tennessee, and Arkansas, the Rio Colorado and other minor rivers in California and New Mexico. Next, we observe them very abundant in the two remarkable depressed lakes, the Caspian and the Dead Sea. In islands, Ceylon, Sicily, Zante, and other of the Greek islands, in Sumatra, and in a special manner in Trinidad near the mouths of the Orinoco. Along the skirts of great mountain-ranges and between mountain-ranges and the sea; thus in Pennsylvania and Virginia, in the country on either side of the Alleghanies; in Tennessee, intersected by the Cumberland mountains; in Texas, with its broken ranges of mountains parallel to the coast, and large rivers running from them and through them into the Gulf of Mexico; between the mountains and the sea in the south of Asia Minor, of Persia, and Belochistan.

*Notices of it are given in the works of Elphinstone, Burnes, Vigne, Edwardes, and others.

+ Accounts of the nature and effects of such missiles are given in De Joinville's 'Life of St. Louis,' and in the pages of Gibbon, Niebulir, Hallam, &c., and more particularly in Messrs. Reinaud and Fave's Treatise on the 'Feu Grégeois.' See also Ammian. Marcell. ; Vegetius, 'De Re Militari;' Tasso, Jer. Del.' xii. 42-44.

The fire-pao mentioned by Polo, the agni-aster of the ancient Hindoo poems, and the fire-darts referred to by Menu, have possibly been of the same kind.

Hanway; Abbé Huc, 'Chinese Empire,' ch. xi.; Indian Annals of Medical Science,' no. iii. 250; Ainslie, Materia Indica,' i. 41; Honigberger, 'Thirty Years in the East,' &c. New Account of East India and Persia, nine years' travels, 1672–1681, by J. Fryer, M.D., p. 318.

Lane's Thousand and One Nights,' iii. 66; Yule's 'Marco Polo,' vol. ii. p. 342; Renaudot, Ancient Accounts of India and China,' p. 94.

In all these various kinds of geographical situation they are found, their production and exhibition being subject to necessary geological and other conditions, on which it is not the purpose of this paper to enter.

The frequent association of these products with salt has been noticed. The oilfields of the Punjab, which have lately been surveyed and reported on, are all in the north-west part of the broken series of hills and tract of country bearing the general name of the Salt Range, containing the inexhaustible stores of massive salt from which that province and neighbouring countries have been supplied for many centuries. The explanation of the connexion of salt with petroleum has yet to be sought, but the fact meanwhile is important.

The oil is not always accompanied with gas, but the inflammable gas appears generally, if not always, to indicate the existence of the oil in some form, and particularly, as it appears, in regions producing salt.

The oil is obtained, as in Burmah, by making excavations in the soil in which it has become diffused, into which excavations or wells the oil slowly passes from the soil around. And it is procured by deep borings, in which it may rise in the manner of water in artesian wells, by hydrostatic pressure, or, as in the many instances with which descriptions of American and other oil-wells have made us familiar, forced up from reservoirs in subterranean cavities under the pressure of steam or other vapour. In any geographical situation it may be obtained in the first manner. It is when it occurs along the outskirts of mountain-ranges that it may rise as in artesian water-wells; and where the earth has been subjected to violent internal action, and the rocks have been much split and displaced, it is obtained from cavities and veins, frequently attended with escape of gas at the surface of the ground and spontaneous discharges of the oil.

These appear to be, in a general way, the kinds of situation and the modes in which, where these products have been formed, they are obtained for use, or where the surface-indications of their presence occur. It is desirable that further

and more definite information should be gathered by those whose experience of oilregions, or other opportunities, afford them the means of contributing to our knowledge of a subject which has come to be of great practical importance as well as of scientific and general interest.

On the Formation of Sand-bars. By Dr. R. J. MANN.

Report on Badakolan. By PANDIT MANPHAL, C.S.I.

On the Eastern Cordillera, and the Navigation of the River Madeira.
By C. R. MARKHAM, C.B., Sec. R.G.S.

The author began by referring to the paper which he read before the Association at the Leeds Meeting in 1858, and in which he showed the vast importance of the opening up of lines of water communication between the Andes and the Atlantic by way of the Amazons, and the immense extent of country which then remained to be explored. Having pointed out what has since been done in the way of discovery, he proceeded to give an account of the recent investigations connected with that portion of the mighty eastern Cordillera of the Andes which contains the sources of streams that form the Beni, and to report upon the operations which are in contemplation, with a view to opening a navigable route from the Beni to the Atlantic by way of the river Madeira. The old Yncas of Peru did all that was possible to secure for their people the wealth of those interminable forests to the eastward of the Andes, but they did not know that the rivers dashing down from their mountains led to an ocean whence the arts and products of the whole world might be brought to their doors. But their descendants see, in the mighty Amazon and her tributaries, a means of saving the ruinous land-carriage of their merchandize to the Pacific coast. The cost of taking a ton of merchandize from Cuzco, the capital of the Yncas, or from La Paz, the commercial capital of Bolivia, to England, is about £40, the time five months. Under such conditions no produce but gold, silver, and chinchona bark would pay the expense

of transit. By the route of the Madeira and Amazons, this voyage of five months will be reduced to six weeks, the course being through a civilized empire which takes the lead in opening the way for the commerce of the world; while the opening of those great fluvial highways will also have the effect of solving the most interesting questions in South American geography. The section of the Eastern Andes, which is drained by the feeders of the Beni, extends from the parallel of Cuzco to that of La Paz. This eastern chain forms a giant wall, running up into the loftiest peaks of South America in its southern portion, and everywhere rising above the line of perpetual snow. The author showed that the cartography of the south-eastern end of the chain is well defined in our best modern maps, while that of the north-western portion is in a state of much confusion; and he also pointed out some analogous features which exist between the Andean and the Himalayan ranges. He then described in some detail the physical features of the region, which is peculiarly interesting, leading to the conclusion that the complete examination of the great affluent of the Madeira will result in opening up one of the richest countries in the world, provided that the question of turning the rapids of the Madeira, and of making the lower part of its course navigable, is grappled with and overcome. The Brazilian Government is alive to the importance of developing the resources and fostering the trade of the Amazon valley, and has caused an elaborate survey to be made of the Madeira rapids. These are eighteen in number, the total fall being 272 feet. The length of the river course, containing rapids, is 229 miles, and the length of actual broken water is 12 miles. The difference between low water and floods is about 20 feet, the rise commencing in October and ending in March. Commerce is now carried past in launches and canoes carrying from 3 to 8 tons. At six out of eighteen rapids it is necessary to haul the boats round overland, at five others the boats are hauled up stream while the boats are carried round, and the rest are merely difficult passes where the loaded craft easily shoot along the current. Serious steps have now been taken to overcome these obstacles. A concession has been granted for the construction of a railway round the rapids, which will be 170. miles long, including a short branch to the mouth of the Beni. Above the Madeira rapids there are 3000 miles of river suited to steam navigation; and the articles of commerce, which would at once find an outlet by this route, are Chinchona bark, India-rubber, vanilla, sarsaparilla, balsams, aloes, valerian, dye-woods, gums, wax, hammocks and bats, cacas, coffee, hides and tallow, wool, skins, cotton, gold, silver, and copper. Commerce is already treading close on the heels of discovery; and Peruvian bark, hitherto shipped exclusively from Pacific ports, is now beginning to find its way to England by the Amazon and Pará. The trade of the Amazons, which was less than half a million when the steamers began to run in 1853, is now upwards of £2,000,000; and this only represents the traffic on the main stream. The increase will certainly be enormous when the mighty affluents bring down the products of the Andes to find their way, by this magnificent fluvial highway, to the Atlantic. The country is one possessing boundless capabilities, and a bright future must assuredly be in store for that great Amazonian basin which nature has blessed so wonderfully. Nothing can be more likely to conduce to the consummation of its commercial greatness than the thorough examination of those splendid navigable rivers which form the chief affluents of the Amazons, and some of the more important of which are still so little known. In no other part of the world is there a grander field for geographical discovery and research. In no other part will the labours of the explorer be more richly repaid.

On the Geographical Positions of the Tribes which formed the Empire of the Yncas. By CLEMENTS R. MARKHAM, C.B., Sec. R.G.S.

In submitting to the Section the views which a study of early writers, the native languages, and the topography of the country had led him to form respecting the geographical positions of the tribes which combined to form the empire of the Yncas of Peru, the author pointed out that the study of the nature and degree of the civilization attained by the aboriginal Americans is especially important, because that civilization was self-developed. The three American empires of the