Gypsum may also be an indication of oil-bearing strata, for the substitution in limestone of sulphuric for carbonic acid can only be accounted for by the action of these hot sulphurous gases.  Gypsum is found extensively in the petroleum districts of the United States, and it underlies the rock salt beds at Middlesboro, where, on being pierced, it has given passage to oil gas, which issues abundantly, mixed with brine, from a great depth.

III.  Besides the space occupied by “natural gas,” which is very extensive, 17,000 million gallons of petroleum have been raised in America since 1860, and that quantity must have occupied more than 100,000,000 cubic yards, a space equal to a subterranean cavern 100 yards wide by 20 feet deep, and 82 miles in length, and it is suggested that beds of “porous sandstone” could hardly have contained so much; while vast receptacles may exist, carved by volcanic water out of former beds of rock salt adjoining the limestone, which would account for the brine that usually accompanies petroleum.  It is further suggested that when no such vacant spaces were available, the hydrocarbon vapors would be absorbed into, and condensed in, contiguous clays and shales, and perhaps also in beds of coal, only partially consolidated at the time.

There is an extensive bituminous limestone formation in Persia, containing 20 per cent. of bitumen, and the theory elaborated in the paper would account for bitumen and oil having been found in Canada and Tennessee embedded in limestone, which fact is cited by Mr. Peckham as favoring his belief that some petroleums are a “product of the decomposition of animal remains.”

Above all, this theory accounts for the many varieties in the chemical composition of paraffin oils in accordance with ordinary operations of nature during successive geological periods.—­Chem.  News.

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THE COLORADO DESERT LAKE.

Mr. J.J.  Mcgillivray, who has been for many years in the United States mineral survey service, has some interesting things to say about the overflow of the Colorado desert, which has excited so much comment, and about which so many different stories have been told: 

“None of the papers, so far as I know,” said Mr. McGillivray, “have described with much accuracy or detail the interesting thing which has happened in the Colorado desert or have stated how it happened.  The Colorado desert lies a short distance northwest of the upper end of the Gulf of California, and contains not far from 2,500 square miles.  The Colorado River, which has now flooded it, has been flowing along to the east of it, emptying into the Gulf of California.  The surface of the desert is almost all level and low, some of it below the sea level.  Some few hundreds of years ago it was a bay making in from the Gulf of California,