POPULAR SCIENCE 615 



trast with the opinions of scientific writers are the statements 

 of men who have had practical experience in cold storage 

 warehousing." 



A more recent statement of the position of the cold storage 

 industry in its relations to science, especially as regards this 

 country, has been made by J. Wemyss Anderson in a lecture 

 delivered before the Royal Society of Arts ' at the end of 

 the year 1917. Prof. Anderson emphasises the failure to apply 

 the principles of pure science to the problems of cold stor- 

 age, and he says : " While the applied science of the engineer 

 has done much for the advance of cold storage, pure science has 

 in this country done little or nothing for the commercial pre- 

 servation of foodstuffs. " 



With this and much more said in Prof. Anderson's paper 

 we are in complete agreement. In the present articles we 

 shall attempt to show that even a brief consideration of 

 the scientific problems involved and an application of scien- 

 tific principles and methods, modifies profoundly the whole 

 aspect of the subject, widens the scope of industrial applica- 

 tion, and makes it possible to place the whole subject on a 

 more definite research basis, and yet this is probably only what 

 could be done in regard to the application of science to many 

 industrial problems. 



In order to give an insight into the range of problems 

 with which we are concerned, and to indicate the main lines 

 along which research is progressing, it is useful to attempt 

 some sort of classification of the material for research. In the 

 paper already referred to, J. Wemyss Anderson makes use 

 of the following classification of food-stuffs which are kept in 

 cold storage : 



1. Produce whose life history is finished (meat, poultry, 



rabbits, fish). 



2. Produce whose life history is not finished (fruit, eggs). 



3. Milk and produce from milk (cream, butter, cheese). 

 This classification is perhaps not very fortunate, as it is 



rather immaterial whether the life history of the produce is 

 finished or not, as in general the produce is not intended for 

 use in continuing the life-cycle, neither apples nor eggs, for 

 example, being stored in order to propagate the species. 



1 "Science and the Cold Storage Industry," Journ. Roy. Soc. Arts, 66, 82-8, 

 1917. 



