ECONOMIC USES OF NON-EDIBLE FISH. 65 



"heretofore have scarcely yielded ten bushels of wheat by the 

 a,cre, are said, when, dressed with whitefish (menhaden), to have 

 yielded forty. . . . Such, upon the whole, have been their num- 

 bers, and such the ease with which they have been obtained, that 

 lands in the neighborhood of productive fisheries are declared to 

 have risen, within a few years, to three, four, and, in some cases, 

 to six times their former value." 



I shall give only one other authoritj^ for the use of fish and 

 fish refuse as a fertilizer. In 1853 Mr. Ker B. Hamilton, Gov- 

 ernor of Newfoundland, said : " In this island the manure uni- 

 versally applied to the soil is fish, consisting of the superabun- 

 dant herrings and caplins in the process of decomposition, and 

 generally without any earthy admixture ; and the heads, bones, 

 and entrails of codfish." From other sources we learn that in 

 Norway, France, Japan, and in the British Islands, fish has been 

 used, in its raw state, for fertilizing purposes, whenever it was 

 found in great abundance. 



Although we have evidence in the olden writings that the oil 

 obtained from various fishes was used for lighting and other 

 purposes, fish oil was practically unknown in commerce until 

 .about fifty years ago. Since then there have arisen hundreds of 

 purposes to which it is daily applied. 



The origin of the present menhaden industry was the dis- 

 ^30very of an old lady, named Mrs. John Bartlett, of Blue Hill, 

 Maine, who in 1850, when boiling some fish for her chickens, ob- 

 served a thin scum of oil upon the surface of the water. " Some 

 of this she bottled, and when on a visit to Boston soon after car- 

 ried samples to Mr. E. B. Phillips, one of the leading oil mer- 

 chants of that city, who encouraged her to bring more. The 

 following year the Bartlett family industriously plied their gill 

 nets and sent to market thirteen barrels of oil, for which they 

 were paid at the rate of eleven dollars per barrel." In the follow- 

 ing year this family made one hundred barrels. Then, the value 

 of menhaden oil having become recognized, many oil presses of 

 a more or less imperfect construction were established along the 

 coast, and the industry developed so rapidly that within twenty 

 years the yield of menhaden oil exceeded that of the whale (from 

 the American fisheries). It now exceeds the aggregate of all 

 the whale, seal, and cod oil made in the United States, and Prof. 

 Brown Goode says, " As a source of oil, the menhaden is of more 

 importance than any other marine animal." 



The prime object of the first factories established for utilizing 

 menhaden was the production of oil the residuum, or " scrap," 

 as the pressed fish is called, being looked upon as a secondary 

 consideration. Nevertheless, this by-product was of equal worth, 

 and in some years has exceeded in value the output of oil. This 



VOL. XLV. 6 



