Base Exchange and the Formation of Petroleum

Abstract

I HAVE read with great interest Dr. McKenzie Taylor's letter entitled “Base Exchange and the Formation of Coal” which appeared in NATURE of May 19, and am particularly interested in his description of the experiments conducted by him concerning the bacterial decomposition of fats under a roof containing hydrolysing sodium clay. Fats, as a body, are lighter than water, and I am wondering whether Dr. McKenzie Taylor has conducted any experiments, or has any evidence, to show that in Nature solid fats could be a sedimentary deposit in water and accumulate as such together with sand. Some eighteen years ago I demonstrated that oils can be deposited in considerable quantity as an aqueous sediment together with mud or clay, but my experiments indicated that oils could not be similarly deposited by, or together with, sand. For a full description of the phenomenon and my experiments, and also how in Nature the oil would afterwards be squeezed out of the clay into a sand bed, reference may be made to my book, “The Geology of Oil, Oil-Shale, and Coal.”