REMARKS ON COD LIVER OIL. 
99 
the great fishing ground of the Banks of Newfoundland, is the 
best when in good condition, because in that locality the fish attain 
a size and perfection not equalled in any other waters. 
Our readers are generally aware that these Banks, as they are 
called, consist of thousands of square miles of shoal water with 
sandy bottom off the north-eastern coast of North America, and so 
named from their contiguity to the Island of Newfoundland. They 
constitute the largest sub-marine elevation in the world, and abound 
in species of worms which are the great attraction to the codfish. 
(Murray's Encyc. Geograph.) The great north-eastern current 
of the Atlantic, after sweeping around the coral-bound coasts of 
Florida, and gliding past the insular impediments of the Bahamas, 
laden with spoils of the living and the dead from the tropical seas, 
proceeds on uninterruptedly until it strikes on this great sub-ma- 
rine plain (which perhaps it has contributed to elevate,) and there, 
deprived partly of the momentum which has upheld its suspended 
contents they are deposited, to be an inexhaustible and ever reple- 
nishing store for the benefit of the innumerable finny hordes that 
animate the waters above. No wonder, therefore that the codfish 
frequent them in such countless numbers, that it is necessary to 
assist the imagination by recollecting that ten millions of eggs 
have been counted in a single female codfish of moderate size, to 
appreciate their abundance. In this favored locality they fre- 
quently attain a size of forty to seventy pounds, and their livers 
are not only larger and healthier, but afford a greater per centage 
of oil weight for weight. The best Bank livers frequently 
contain one-half and sometimes two-thirds of their weight of 
oil. 
The British fishermen who have all their arrangements for oil 
making on the shores of Newfoundland have the greatest advan- 
tages, for they not only have the best fish, in common with the 
fishermen of other nations who frequent the banks, but they have 
the exclusive right to fish within three miles of the coast. Their 
boats run out from platforms erected along the shore, at the fishing 
settlements, and as soon as they catch a load, return and deliver 
them to persons on the platforms, who attend at once to cleansing 
and salting the fish, and to the preparation of that portion of the 
oil obtained from fresh livers, the greater part, however, being left 
for conversion into brown oil, as will be noticed presently. It may 
