OIL WELLS AT SEA.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 309, 4 January 1908, Page 6

OIL WELLS AT SEA.

The whale is by no means the only source of marine oil. Though little known to fame, the humble menhader yields oil and fertiliser worth £200,000 a year, giving employment to 1800 fishermen and 1000 employees of 50 factories. The people who are to pvolitably engaged in slaughtering 140,000,000 of these lishes every year naturally claim that they were created providentially for the express purpose, since they are not lit for food, and yet the supply seems inexhaustible. No one knows whence they come or whither they go; all we know is that every spring vast schools of them appear in the Gulf of .Mexico, heading north in closely-packed masses, near the surface, utterly incapable of either defence or escape; all that is needed is simply to scoop them up with big seines.

£999,000,000,000 LOST IX ONE DAY. The London "Expresspointed out recently that it would take 40,000 years to mine all the gold which Mr. j. li. Robinson, the .South African magnate, declared was waiting on the Eand for investor*. .Mr. Robinson's picture of an inexhaustible (Jolconda disappears with a correction of his estimate which he lias since made. lie now states that the gold available in worth a thousand million sterling, the difference being due to a clerical error on his part. On this estimate the last ounce of gold in South Africa should be mined forty years hence, at the present rate of progress. Mr. Robinson's "clerical error" reduces tin' value of the gold on the Rand by £990,000,000,000—and this in one day.