OIL, CALMING WAVES WITH. 



OLEOMARGARINE. 



661 



water to enable them to see into the depth of 

 the pools. The fishermen of the Bermudas 

 and the oyster-fishers of Gibraltar employ the 

 same device. The herring-fishers of England 

 detect schools of oil-bearing fish by the still- 

 ness of the surface. The same phenomenon 

 enables the Cornish fishermen to find the 

 sardine. The inhabitants of the Isle of St. 

 Kilda attach cakes of the grease of sea-fowl 

 to the sterns of their boats to prevent the 

 waves from breaking and driving them against 

 the rocks. The Shetland-Islanders understand 

 the efficacy of oil in stilling the violence of the 

 sea, for as they return in their frail craft from 

 the fisheries when the weather is tempestuous, 

 they cut out the livers of the cod which they 

 have caught, as a last resort, and express the 

 oil to save themselves from being swamped. 



Dr. Franklin was the public writer who 

 recognized the value of oil in preventing ma- 

 rine disasters. His attention was attracted to 

 the subject by a letter recounting how a Dutch 

 master saved his vessel from being over- 

 whelmed in a tempest by pouring overboard 

 a small quantity of olive-oil. Franklin was 

 reminded of the fact that the water was al- 

 ways still when there were whalers in New- 

 port Harbor. He experimented in a pond 

 upon a windy day, and found that only a 

 spoonful of oil poured on the water from the 

 windward side spread over a wide space, and 

 produced an instantaneous calm. He repeated 

 the experiment upon a stormy day in the sea 

 off Portsmouth, New Hampshire. While the 

 sea was covered with whitecaps round about, 

 no waves broke in the wake of his boat. He 

 noticed also that a bark was drawn into this 

 smooth track as by a whirlpool. The Scotch 

 publishers, Chambers, endeavored to impress 

 upon the public the utility of this means of 

 rescue, by publishing accounts of ship-captains 

 on the subject. Individual captains have em- 

 ployed oil to break the force of heavy seas, and 

 made a practice of taking it with them for the 

 purpose ; but the generality of mariners treated 

 these well-attested instances with apathy and 

 doubt. A New York captain in a report pub- 

 lished in 1867, in the "Shipping List," attrib- 

 uted the salvation of his vessel on two occa- 

 sions to pouring out a few gallons of oil. Cap- 

 tain Betts, of the King Cenric, bound from 

 Liverpool to Bombay, weathered a hurricane 

 only by suspending canvas sacks of oil from 

 the ship's side, with small punctures to allow 

 the oil to trickle out. Captain Richardson, of 

 Bristol, overtaken by a storm near the Ber- 

 mudas, escaped by the same means. The cap- 

 tain of the Diamond, of Dundee, shipwrecked 

 off Anholt Island, having heard of the escape 

 of a storm-stressed whaler in the South Seas 

 through the accidental breakage of some bar- 

 rels of oil, furnished each boat with a few 

 quarts of oil to pour over the stern, by which 

 means the waves were kept from washing over 

 them, and the crew reached land in safety. 

 The diminutive sail-boat in which two Italian 



captains acquired notoriety, in 1881, by cross- 

 ing the Alantic from Buenos Ayres, would, on 

 several occasions have been lost if they had 

 not used liberally their cargo of oil to assuage 

 the seas. Since the revival of the subject 

 through the efforts of Shields, sea-captains 

 have been more impressed with the value of 

 this simple safeguard. A captain recently 

 arriving in New York attributed his escape 

 from a storm in the North Atlantic to the oil- 

 bags with which he had provided himself. 

 Another captain withstood a terrific squall in 

 the Bay of Biscay by the same means. A 

 third, Captain Floreman, of the Dundee Clip- 

 per Line, passing through a four days' gale on 

 his return from Calcutta, suspended bags of 

 oil from the vessel. Waves of the largest size 

 rolled to within twice the length of the ship, 

 but the area protected by the slowly escaping 

 oil was a dead level. 



The cost, bulk, and weight of a provision of 

 oil carried on board for safety, are offset by the 

 saving of trouble and labor in a tempest, aside 

 from the prime object of security of lives, 

 ships, and cargoes. Many a life could be 

 saved by attaching a small oil-bag to the life- 

 buoys thrown to persons lost overboard, 

 which can be pierced with a knife at the in- 

 stant it is thrown out, and by the calming 

 effect of the oil will reveal from afar the posi- 

 tion of the swimmer. Vessels of oil provided 

 with stopcocks on life-boats, and projectiles 

 which would burst on striking the water and 

 spread oil over the surface, have likewise been 

 proposed for the life-saving service. 



OLEOMARGARINE. Properly speaking, 

 this name is applied to the butter-fat obtained 

 by the process of M. Ni6ge. Oleomargarine 

 butter, or butterine (as it is called by some), is 

 the product obtained by churning oleomarga- 

 rine with milk, which, being colored and salted, 

 has the look and taste of butter. About a 

 dozen years ago, M. Hippolyte Nige, a French 

 chemist and philosopher, undertook various 

 experiments, by direction of Government, to 

 see if it were possible to find, for the use of the 

 navy and poorer classes, a product suited to 

 take the place of ordinary butter, and which 

 could be kept without becoming rancid. By 

 experimenting largely upon milk, he discovered 

 that milk always contained butter-fat, even 

 when cows had been partially or wholly de- 

 prived of food. M. Niege next tried to produce 

 this butter-fat from the fat of the cow, by arti- 

 ficial processes ; and he finally succeeded in get- 

 ting a pure and sweet fat, free from foreign 

 odor, which, by churning with milk, was con- 

 verted into what was considered excellent 

 butter. 



The process by which this is accomplished 

 may be described more in detail, as follows: 

 The fat of the cow (or beef fat) is thrown 

 piece by piece into large tanks containing te- 

 pid water, where it remains for an hour or two, 

 when the water is drawn off and fresh water 

 brought into the tank. Each piece is then 



