orm. Owing to the enormous cost of handling
coal, wood, and other crude fuel, and of removing the ash resulting
from such fuel, it has been demonstrated in practice by the use of
crude oil that the expense connected with the burning of brick can be
reduced fully 60 per cent. This large saving is made by converting
crude petroleum into gas and utilizing this fuel, either directly in
the arches of the kiln or by converting the crude oil into gas in a
gas producer, and drawing this fuel gas from the producer and burning
the same as required in kilns of suitable construction.

Crude oil fuel must in the future play an important part in all
branches of manufacture requiring high, constant heats, and in which
the cost of wood, coal, and other solid fuels, together with the labor
cost of handling them, forms a considerable part of the cost of
production. Where coal is required to be hauled in carts from the
wharves, or from a line of railway to the brick yard, located a mile,
more or less, from the places where the coal is received, the cost of
handling, haulage, and waste is an important item. Added to these
costs, the deterioration of soft coal under atmospheric influences and
the waste from imperfect combustion and from the particles which fall
from the grate bars into the ash pits, all eat a large hole in the
brickmakers' profit.

Mr. D.V. Purington, of Chicago, Ill., in speaking on this subject,
says:

"I will say that my fuel bill for oil is cheaper than it would
cost me for coal. There is a very wide difference in the cost
of unloading, hauling away ashes and cinders, and getting my
coal around to the kiln, or boilers, or drier, or wherever I
use it, and I get very much better results by being able to
put the heat from oil fuel just where I want it."

In order to secure the best results with any fuel it is not only
necessary that a cheap fuel should be used, but that it should be
always obtainable, and that all of it should be burned and turned to
commercial account in the operations of brick manufacture.

Owing to the losses which we have previously mentioned, and resulting
from the use of coal, this fuel is destined to be superseded by some
form of fuel which will avoid such losses, and which will dispense
with all of the inconveniences now encountered in the handling of coal
and of the ashes resulting from combustion. Wood is rapidly becoming
too scarce and high near the great centers of