What Science Teaches

Feilding Star, Volume XI, Issue 45, 3 October 1889, Page 3

What Science Teaches

Professor J. F. Jones answers, in a recent issue of the popular Science Monthly, the question, "Is it safe to drill the earth too much ?" The professor assumes the earth to be a hollow sphere filled with a gaseous substance, called by us natural gas, and he thinks that tapping these reservoirs will cause disastrous explosions, resulting from the lighted gas coming in contact with that which is escaping. He compares the earth to a balloon floated and kept distended by the gas in the interior, which, if exhausted, would cause the crust to collapse, affect the m >t ion of the earth in its orbit, cause it to lose its place among the heavenly bodies and fall to pieces. Another writer thinks that drilling should be prohibited by stringent iawb. He, too, thinks there is a possibility of an explosion. Still another theorist has investigated the gas wells with telephones and delicate thermometers, and he announces startling discoveries. He distinguished sounds like the breaking of rocks, and estimated that a mile and one half or so beneath the Ohio and Indian gas-field the temperature of the earth is 3,500 degs.