Thus in ten years more than 4,000 whales have been captured in the immediate vicinity of Newfoundland. The effect was disastrous and caused the ruin of the smaller companies, the chief sufferers being the smaller shareholders who had invested their entire capital. Since then the number of stations in operation has been reduced and some of the steamers sold, not more than ten stations being operated in any one year and only six or eight of these at one time. Still the catch has steadily decreased and in 1913 only two hundred and twenty-two whales were taken. One of the arguments in favor of indiscriminate whaling has been the theory that whales had the whole world to draw upon and that the depletion in any one locality would soon be supplied by overflow from another. To a slight extent this may be true, for there seems some reason to believe that whales do now and then pass from the Pacific to the Atlantic,[20] but on the whole whales are restricted in their range as other animals[21] and extermination in one place means extermination in that locality for all time. Another fallacy was the belief that the supply of whales was practically limitless and that one might “slay and slay and slay” continuously. There is not a more mischievous term than “inexhaustible supply,” and certainly none more untrue. So we see our inexhaustible forests on the verge of disappearing, our inexhaustible supplies of coal and oil daily growing less, and the end of the inexhaustible supply of whales in sight. Man is recklessly spending the capital Nature has been centuries in accumulating and the time will come when his drafts will no longer be honored. It matters not whether the vessel is a bucket or an ocean, one can only take out as much water as it contains and where all is outgo and no income, it is merely a question of time when one or the other will be emptied.[22] Footnote 20: “Capt. Bull states that a sulphur-bottom whale shot on the coast of Norway contained a harpoon fired into it on the coast of Kamchatka and that a humpback killed off Aquaforte was found to have in the flesh an unexploded bomb lance fired from a San Francisco whaler in the Pacific.” Footnote 21: “For example, the sulphur-bottom is not found or occurs as a straggler on the east coast of Newfoundland; although once common on the south coast.” Footnote 22: “The Passing of the Whale.” Zoölogical Society Bulletin, July, 1908, No. 30, supp., pp. 446–447. Thus, about fifteen years after the first modern station was erected in Newfoundland shore whaling practically ended, for today only six or eight factories are in operation and have a _combined_ yearly catch of about two hundred whales, instead of over one thousand two hundred as in 1904.