The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1915-12-18
THE FARMER: DECEMBER is, 1915

sale at appraised values based upon an estimate of the content of the land. This is at best an experts guess and converts each purchase into a gam ble, both on the part of the Govern ment and the purchaser. The bill does not exclude this method. but supple mentS 1t with a simple provision by which the purchaser, instead of buy Ing at hazard, may pay a royalty upon what he produces. It gives the man of moderate means an opp9rtu- nifty to secure a. mine.
 The Oil Well as Placer Claim.
 As to oil and gas, the House com mittee had extensive hearings, at which no practical man engaged in the industry offered any objection to the plan proposed. The existing law, under which such lands have been ta- ken up Is to be characterized by no po1iter word than as a plain nlisdt. Oil Is found hundreds and sometimes thousands of feet below the surface of the earth, yet the law applicable to it's acquisition is the placer law, intended to apply to the recovery of superf- cial minerals.
 An Invaluable Mineral
 There is another charge to be made against the existing law more serious than it's unworkability. It is supreme ly wasteful. If the land is leased
 
 manner of development. Millions of barrels of oil have been wasted by be- ing allowed to flow into the streams, by being mixed with water, or by eVap- oration. There has been no such waste, I am told, in any other mining; and petroleum is a priceless resource, Tor it can never be replaced. Trees can be grown again on the soil from which they have been taken. But l1ow can petroleum be produced? It has taken the ages for nature to dis till it in her subterranean laboratory We do not even know her process. We may find a substitute for it, but have not yet. It is practically the one lubricant of the world to-day. Not 8. railroad wheel turns without it's way being smoothed by it We can make light and heat by hydro-AIectric pow bearings that are sInothered in petro- leum. From it we get the Quick-ex- plodifg gas which is to the motor and 4the air-ship what air is to the human body. To industry, agriculture, com merce, and the pleasures of life pe- troIeun is now essential Therefore to waste it is a. crime. An absolutet goyernment would prohibit a barrel of it being used for fuel before every drop of kerosene, gasoline, and other invaluable constituents have been ta- ken from it. \ How much of it there is in the United States no one knows. The Geological Survey has made a, maxi mum estimate of 23,0OO,o0O,0O0 bar rels, which sounds like an inexhausti- ble supply. But at the rate that it is now being consumed in this country alone (265, 100000 barrels a year) this does not mean an indefinite supply, and from the rapid exhaustion of some fields it is manifest that there can be no real approximation of the oil in our lands. Whatever the sup -@I- ,I.<. 11I d in i+S crude state to compete with coal fuel, and the Government should not promote it's being wasted by apply ing to it archaic laws under which waste is a certainty.
 Turning Water Into Power.
 When Benjamin Franklin caught the lightning on the tail of his kite he cid a lot of strange things Tor this world, of which IFc are only begiEning to learn Among these are the uses to which flowing water may be put. The oId-fashioned water wheel which was the motive power of UT early in- dustries, is now converted into tur- hjne which generates electricity, and this has as great variety of uses as the muscles of a mans arm or horses shoulder. Among the oth17 CT strange things done by Benjamin Franklin was to give an added and pe-| cu1iar value to the 1edges of granitet
 
 and turn them into dam sites, useful for purposes of power generation ! How many of these there are on pub lie land not yet disposed of no one knows, but we have several hundre-t under withdrawal, which should be freeed from withdrawal and turned in to use just as quickly as possible; for as the muscle of man or horse can raise a few barrels of water from the well to supply stock or irrigate the garden patch, so can the power or the stream, turned into electricity, be us- ed to raise millions of barrels of water to frrigate alfalfa farms or orchards Then, too, there is that mystify1ng miracle of drawing nitrogen from the air for chemical. use, which can De done only with great power but IS be- ing done in Germany, Norway, Swe- den. France, Switzerland and else where, by which an inexhaustible subs stitute for the almost exhausted ni- trates of Chile has been found This is already a great industry in Europe and will by necessity become greater in the United States than elsewhere, because of our size and need and op- portunity To increase the yield or our farms and to. give us an 1ndepen- dent and adequate supply of nitrogen for the explosives used in war; we must set water wheels at work that will fix nitrogen in lime. And there are still more intimate uses for Ih1s power-in places in Montana it is so cheap that it operates the churn, the sewing machine, and the vacuum cleaner, and supplies light to the house and fuel to the kitchen range Indeed for the possible uses or eIec- tricity there is no measure.
 Accompanying the general develop ment bill in it's passage through the, House was a measure intended to pro- mote hydro-eIectric development on public lands, named after the cna1r- man of inc Public Lands Committee of the House, Mr. Ferris. / This bill was called for by the fact that exist ing legislation permitted only re vocable permit to be granted for sucn use, and this was regarded by eng1n- eers and financiers as too tentative and hazardous a. tenure where millions of ,,anre,r- were needed for. the instalIa-