"BOTTLED SUNLIGHT."

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 151, 29 June 1927, Page 9

"BOTTLED SUNLIGHT."

CONCENTRATED VITAMIN

When Grossmith wrote his slithery song, "Cod Liver Oil," the method of his singing it, and the smooth, sliding quality of the notes set many in his audiences shuddering and swallowing. Those whose physical condition had called for the administration of the stimulating, fattening, vitamin-contain-ing, fishy oil, felt cold chills down the spino at the mere mention of the stuff.

Chemists have tracked the essential "bottled sunlight" of the. oil to certain microscopic vegetation living on the surface of the sea. This minute vepetation of the ocean stores up "Vitamin D," which finds its way into the liver of the cod by way of" small animals which eat the vegetation, and transfer it to smaller fish by being themselves eaten. The cod cats these small fish, and by his physological processes it settles in lib liver, whence it is compressed, after his unlamented death, for the benefit of consumptives and children ill-nourished or afllicted with rickets.

A complicated process, better understood than that taking place within the cod, has been devised, by which the vitamin is extracted in concentrated form.

Three, thousand gallons of the oil (as commonly refined and bottled for use) is put into a tank, and from this great bulk is extracted the non-oily portion—amounting to thirty to sixty gallons. This is again concentrated, until no more than a two-thousandth part of the original quantity is left. This is worth £1 per teaspoonful, and goes (whero most good things go) to London. One drop of this extract is c<]uhl to XI teuspoonfuls of the oil, and is therefore mixed with malt or glycerine or made into tablets of fixed dosage.