Excerpt from The Genesis of Petroleum and Asphaltum in California
It can be tentatively stated that fossil bitumens are principally derived from terrestrial and marine vegetation, deposited in sedimentary strata, then changed to carbonaceous matter, and afterwards distilled by the heat of metamorphism.
In other words, the bitumens are Nature's coal oils and tars distilled in Natures still, generally with infinite slowness when compared with a modern tar still or retort.
Although some of the hydrocarbons can be produced synthetically in the laboratory, still it is to be believed that nearly all, if not all, of the accumulations of fossil hydrocarbons owe their existence to the vital principle that they are derived directly or indirectly from organized beings - animal or vegetable, probably the latter, for reasons given hereafter.
In the decomposition of vegetable tissue, when air is wholly or partially excluded from it, as, for example, when buried in the ground, the constituent elements of the vegetable tissue re-arrange themselves mutually into new products, either with or without the co-operation of the elements of water, the oxygen gradually uniting with the carbon to form carbonic acid, which separates and leaves as a residue substances rich in carbon and hydrogen. It is in this way that bituminous coal, peat, and brown coal (lignite) have been formed from vegetable matter.
With carbonaceous material in the same deposit, the same series of strata, or in the same stratum, there are differences of composition. The varieties of carbonaceous materials may have been produced from different kinds of plant form, from which coal has been derived, and the peculiar conditions of the districts where the plants flourished before their downfall and inhumation or submersion.
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