The Age of Petroleum which began with sudden and dramatic power on August 27, 1859, when the first commercial oil well was completed near Titusville, Pennsylvania, is just a century old. The story of oil and of the industrial and social transformations it has effected during the past one hundred years is a rewarding one in itself. But J. Stanley Clark has provided an extra insight into this great development by tracing also the course of production techniques from rank waste to conservation. It is a story of the quick grab for mineral riches; of unpredictable results in times when geology had...