502 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



before the weather will permit unloading. Either the closeness 

 of the air beneath tightly battened hatches or the heat of mid- 

 summer weather causes the rapid ripening of the fruit, and it 

 may be the case at either season that when the shijj is unloaded 

 there is found a mass of ripe and decayed fruit which will not 

 pay the cost of its transportation. Thus the shipper's lot is likely 

 to be by no means a happy one, and the success of a trip may 

 depend largely on the skill and judgment of the shipmaster. 



Fruit which arrives in good condition is transferred by wagons 

 to cool and dark storehouses to ripen, or by rail to interior mar- 

 kets with the utmost dispatch. One may often see a fruiter just 

 arrived at her pier in one of our large seaports, by whose side lies 

 a huge scow bearing freight cars, into which the green bunches 

 are being rapidly passed and stowed for transportation hundreds 

 of miles inland. 



And so, throughout the year, the work goes on, affording 



profitable occupation to people who need it and healthful variety 



to tables that welcome it. Surely the story of one of the choicest 



products of Nature's laboratory can not be without interest 



where that of every result of human ingenuity finds so large an 



audience. 







TYNDALL AND HIS AMERICAN VISIT.* 



Bt Miss E. A. YOUMANS. 



IN the death of Prof. Tyndall science has lost one of its greatest 

 modern leaders, and the century one of its most striking per- 

 sonalities. In early life he became prominent as an original in- 

 vestigator, and later he was even more distinguished as a popu- 

 lar scientific teacher. Probably no man of his time did more to- 

 ward freeing science from the shackles of ecclesiasticism, and 

 vindicating its claims to public regard. With less than the usual 

 advantages of birth or position, he rose by sheer force of char- 

 acter and natural ability to the headship of one of the foremost 

 scientific institutions of learning and research in the world, the 

 Royal Institution of Great Britain. Here, as Professor of Physics, 

 which appointment he received in 1853, he continued those origi- 

 nal researches which had already made his name familiar in sci- 

 entific circles, and subsequently, on the death of Faraday, he suc- 

 ceeded to the directorship of the institution. 



His researches in physics embraced magnetism, electricity, 

 light, heat, and sound, the latter including a long series of experi- 

 ments on the atmosphere as a vehicle of sound, with a view to the 



* A biographical sketch of Prof. Tvndall, with a portrait on steel, appeared in The Popu- 

 lar Science Monthly for November, 18 7 2. 



