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Daubeny found the mud-volcanoes of Macaluba giving out bitumen, and bubbles of carbonic acid and carburetted hydrogen.
In every age, the foundation and ruin of the Assyrian cities has been easy and rapid: the country is destitute of stone and timber; and the most solid structures are composed of bricks baked in the sun, and joined by a cement of the native bitumen.
Then it is raised to the surface and made ready for market. Did you ever notice that some pieces of coal are dull and smutty, while others are hard and bright? The dull coal is called bituminous, because it contains more bitumen or mineral pitch.
At Abou-Sharein TAYLOR found a building in which an upper story was supported by a mass of crude brick faced with blocks of dressed sandstone. The stones of the lower courses were held together by mortar, those of the upper ones by bitumen. The materials for this revetment must have been quarried in one of those rocky hills islands, perhaps, formerly with which Lower Chaldæa is sparsely studded.
It is true that we find the anthracite coal of the same period with comparatively little bituminous matter; but this is where the bitumen has been destroyed by the action of the internal heat of the earth.
Besides this, we have also the natural cinnabarum or vermillion, the sulphurous glebe called bitumen in old time, for mortar, and yet burned in lamps where oil is scant and geson; the chrysocolla, copperas, and mineral stone, whereof petriolum is made, and that which is most strange, the mineral pearl, which as they are for greatness and colour most excellent of all other, so are they digged out of the main land and in sundry places far distant from the shore.
"Pig-metal," mumbled the reporter, "um! coal facilities, um! hands employed, twelve hundred, bitumen, um! all right, I believe, Mr. Clarke; sinking-fund, what did you say was your sinking-fund?" "Twelve hundred hands?" said the stranger, the young man who had first spoken. "Do you control their votes, Kirby?" "Control? No." The young man smiled complacently.
The Angelus is one of the few of Millet's works which have changed with time. The color has grown dark and the canvas has cracked somewhat, owing to the use of bitumen in the painting. The artist Millet loved to draw as well as to paint. Black and white pictures had their charm for him as truly as those in color.
Now, it is to be observed, that, if the cavity in the solid limestone or marble, which is lined with calcareous crystals containing pyrites, had been thus encrusted by means of the filtration of water, this water must have dissolved calcareous spar, pyrites, and bitumen. But these natural appearances would not even be explained by this dissolution and supposed filtration of those substances.
The top of the hill is covered with dry clay, in which are numerous basins full of warmish water mixed with mud and bitumen. From these small craters bubbles of gas arise from time to time; but at long intervals they become much more active, and throw up jets of wet mud to the height of nearly two hundred feet. This mud smells strongly of sulphur.
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