Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/90

86 it steadily declined notwithstanding a phenomenal increase in prices—an increase amounting to somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand per cent, during the course of the century!

Curves for the prices of oils need not be added. They of course show the sperm oil constantly higher than whale oil, with both showing considerable vacillations for about the first half century of the period here

under consideration. At the time of the Civil War, with the whaling fleet rapidly decreasing and many of the vessels still in the service lying idle, the prices mounted high; but this was also the time of the establishment of the petroleum industry, by the development of which the fate of whaling was sealed. The prices gradually fell until in spite of the scarcity of the products they reached almost the level of those that prevailed when the industry was at its height.