Yet in the face of so much that is disheartening, a great industry has been developed by sheer persistence; and Baku now links the dim past to the most advanced ideas of to-day, sharing alike in Oriental and western civilization. This an cient desert town has risen from obscurity to world fame. From the home of medieval Persian Khans, it has come to be the home of modern oil kings—Armenian millionaires who, perhaps, can scarcely read or write. Modern streets, stores, of fice buildings, electric lights and telephones, fac tories, and smoking chimneys, show the influence of the West. In strange contrast stands the an cient city and all-pervading spirit of the East; the clumsy water cart and the camel train ; the palace of the Khans, the mosques and the towers of ro mantic legends. It is everywhere a confusion of the old and the new, of East and West on the threshold of modern civilization. Petroleum has performed many wonders, but none greater than this.
The United States and Russia stand alone in the petroleum industry, the latest statistics crediting them with seven eighths of the total for the world.
Of this, the United States produced five eighths, and Russia the other two eighths. A great many other countries produce some petroleum, but only a few of them have attained any real commercial importance. The Dutch East Indies, Galicia, Rou mania, India, and Japan have risen to the distinc tion of exceeding 1,000,000 barrels a year, while Canada, Germany, Peru, Italy, and various others eke out a million between them. Yet two of these countries, India and Canada, have each enjoyed for a time the honor of being probably the greitt est producing locality in the world.
The Burman oil fields in the Irrawady valley were supplying oil to the whole of the empire be for the beginning of the last century, and some time after that the production was estimated at several hundred thousand barrels yearly. This quantity is many times greater than was ever reached by the Russian fields during the early days of the government monopoly, so that the Bur man supply a hundred years ago was undoubtedly the greatest in the world. At the present time, the industry is carried on in two localities, the largest in the Irrawady valley south of Mandalay, the source of the so-called " Rangoon oil," the other including the Arakan Islands and a section of the neighboring coast. The combined produc tion in the two areas is about equal to that of the Louisiana field, the recent introduction of modern appliances having tripled the output inside of three years.
Oil wells were sunk in the western part of the province of Ontario from about 1857 onward, and a few years later this portion of Canada was prob ably the most productive region in the world. Some of the wells yielded six to seven thousand barrels a day in 1862, the supply being so great that there was practically no sale and "millions of barrels flowed off into the creeks." But the lead ership was short, for the Pennsylvania fields soon rose to much greater prominence at the time of the Pithole craze, while the Canadian supplies steadily diminished. The yields in recent years have been only a fourth or a fifth of what a single well was producing in the early days. Indications afforded by developments in the Northwestern provinces, however, point to the possibility of Canada in the future rising once more to something like its orig inal rank.
The commercial development of the petroleum deposits in the Dutch East Indies is entirely of recent origin, in spite of the fact that the natives appear to have used it for centuries. In view of the Dutch system of colonial administration for revenue, it is strange that the oil fields were prac tically untouched until about twenty years ago in Java and Sumatra, and ten years ago in Dutch Borneo. The deposits in Sumatra are located on the northeast coast, and in Java on both north and south coasts; but all of these fields are less impor tant than the South Borneo district, which began with a giant gusher in 1898. The rapid growth of the industry in these Dutch possessions has, in the last decade, placed them ahead of the much older fields of Galicia, Roumania, India, and Ja pan. The abundance of the available supplies has, of course, had much to do with this encouraging growth, but the rational system of development has been an equally important factor. With charac teristic Dutch foresight, the most up-to-date ap paratus was brought from the United States before work was begun, and all the important develop ments were undertaken by large interests having sufficiently abundant capital to carry through the necessary trial borings. Few indeed are the places where oil prospecting has been undertaken in such a thoroughly businesslike manner. Success was al most inevitable under the circumstances and the Dutch supplies have deservedly come to be a decid edly important factor in the oil trade of the Orient.