Outlines of the Occurrence and Geology of Petroleum: an Introductory Handbook

Abstract

MR. STIGAND'S handbook is one of the most generally satisfactory of the many smaller works now available regarding the geology of oil. In the discussion of the origin of petroleum he concludes that it comes from many different sources, but that the bulk of it is due to micro-organisms. The chapter on field structures is admirably clear and does not attach to anticlines the exaggerated importance often assigned to them. The author is optimistic as to the quantity of oil available; he gives a long list, stratigraphically arranged, of oil-bearing localities, and if most of them were to become important producers the future supply of mineral oil would be assured; but many of the places in the list will probably not yield oil in quantities of commercial importance. The author lays on the mineralogists the responsibility for the denial that coal is a mineral, whereas reference to the text-books by Miers, the two by Dana, and the handbooks of the Mineralogical Department of the British Museum would show that the mineralogists are not the authors of the definition which leads to that ludicrous conclusion. The most important part of the work is an appendix on oil-field survey by the torsion balance, by magnetic and electric methods, by the use of seismic and acoustic observations, and of radioactivity. There is a useful bibliography on this branch of oil prospecting.