BELIEVE IT OR NOT!

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4043, 4 May 1938, Page 10

BELIEVE IT OR NOT!

WHAT THE WORLD OWES TO SHEEP. SCIENCE FINDS MANY USES. If the horse is the friend of man, the sheep is our provider, says Maxwell Munden in the Sunday Chronicle. Believe it or not, we are indebted to the sheep for— The rustlessness of our razor blades; The growth of the British Empire; The efficiency of our tennis, squash or badminton racquets; Keeping our rates and taxes down:, The quick-healing of our operations; Rouge, lipstick, face-creams anu other cosmetics. Let’s look at the sheep in the various -stages of its life. Alive, it saves parks, golf courses and public commons thousands oi pounds a year in grass-mowing costs Sheep give the world 1,750,000 tons of wool a year. Imagine this amount of wool heaped in piles the sizes oi the average haystack, which weighs 20 tons. It would make 87,500 oi those. Wool runs like a skein through thd history of the British Empire. The influence of the sheep crops up repeatedly. Woollen manufacture was already a commerce in Britain when Julius Caesar arrived. And it soon became such a rich source of English wealth that at least three monarchs have passed special laws to protect it. Charles 11. even went so far as to levy a tax on all corpses not buried in woollens. Some 300 years before him, Edward 111. showed the Lord Chancellor where he expected the money to come from for his expeditions in Franch by making the Chancellor’s official seat in the House of Lords a large sack or wool. The Woolsack is still the Lord Chancellor’s official seat in the House. But it was not until 1744 that Robert Bakewell, hardy Leicestershire yeoman, put sheep breeding in England on a scientific basis. He made stock breeding an expert study foi the first tim®; provided better meat for England’s then fast-growing millions, better wool for England’s busy mills. Then things began to happen in England’s new colony, Australia. Her growth and prosperity can be traced directly to one man’s pioneering spirit—and sheep. In 1794 John MacArthur, who had accompanied the first consignment of emigrants, was given a commission and 200 acres of land as an inducement to settle there. He began to experiment at breeding from a handful of sheep on the slopes around Sydney harbour. Necessity forced him to explore and discover much of Australia’s richest grazing’ lands. To-day, Australia’s 114,0100,000

sheep give her one-quarter of the world’s wool production, and are her chief source of income.

But the msot interesting thing about the sheep is the grease that has to be washed from its wool b ( efore the fleece can be -used. For centuries “wool-dirt’ ’was a waste product. It filled the Bradford sewers, and in woolcombing countries where water was scarce the need to wash wool was a curse.

Then in 1890 an English chemist experimented with woolgrease and read a paper on his findings to the Society of the Chemical Industry. First it was found that wool-grease in its refined state—lanolin—is the nearest to human fat ever known. It will take a tincture into the bloodstream within a few minutes of being put on the skin. In a few years the enormous cosmetic industry sprang up, with its millions of pounds turnover and an insatiable demand for skin-benefiting chemicals.

Just after the last war, British industry became alarmed at the increasing amount of dermatitis and similar skin troubles suffered by workers each year.

The Home Office was asked to investigate. After considerable research, a committee found that lanolin would put back into the human skin the natural fats taken out by the mineral oils, spirits, and acids used in industrial processes. To-day thousands of employees in factories and works are provided with drums of this refined sheep’s grease for use before and after work. But the help the humble sheep’s grease has given pharmaceutics is nothing compared with the way it has come to the rescue of the metal industries.

The greatest curse of the metal age has been . . . Thousands of poiunds’ worth of stocks can be ruined in a night if damp hits a warehouse of uncoated metal goods. Rust can destroy whole shiploads of machinery, tools, nuts, and bolts, razor blades, or engine parts going to tropical climates. Scientists have found that wool grease, refined to the stage of lanolin, has unique metal-protective qualities. Thousands of gallons of lanolin rust preventives are used to protect metal goods during export and between manufacturing processes. Uses for sheep’s grease in its various stages of refinement are still being found. In its cruder state it is used as a lubricant, and in the manufacture of soap and candles. Its waterproofing qualities (ever noticed how rain runs off a sheep’s wool?) have led paint manufacturers to investigate its uses in their trade. So much for the sheep alive. Dead, it becomes one of the world’s most important foods. New Zealand is the biggest exporter of mutton and lamb, and we in the United Kingdom take 95 per cent, of the world’s total exports, and are the third largest producers.

The British Empire, in fact, is the mutton and lamb business, for it furnishes about 81 per cent. of the world’s supplies. Then there are the inedible parts of the sheep, the sausage trade, for instance, depends on the sheep’s intestines for its skins. “Catgut” is made from sheep’s intestines, too, and is a large industry founded on just this one small part of the sheep. It is used for surgical purposes and racquet and musical strings. At the London Hospital’s ligature department in Whitechapel, 2500 lambs’ intestines are converted every week into stitches for sewing opera-

tion wounds. Sheep’s hooves are usually sent to the chemical department at Woolwich Arsenal and boiled down to help make nitro-glycerine and other explosives.