216 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
only amounts to 72,600 kilogram-frigories. Lastly, moreover, in the 
United States the constructors and consulting engineers often express 
the cooling capacity of the machines in gallon degrees per minute, 
the temperature of the refrigerator being kept at —10 F. (—23°.3 C). 
Such a unit is equal to 110.26 hour-frigories. 
It would be very useful to adopt for the refrigeration capacity, 
and for the different quantities which have to be considered in the 
refrigeration industry, a perfectly coordinate system of units lke 
that used in the electricity. 
M. Maurice Leblane has submitted a very carefully studied out 
report on this subject. But in view of the opposition of the English- 
speaking delegates the question does not seem to be fully settled, 
and Section II has passed the following resolution : 
“That an international scientific commission, composed of theo- 
retical and practical specialists in the subject of low temperatures, 
shall be appointed to consider values, units, and notation suitable to 
the refrigerating industry, and shall report at the next Congress.” 
It is to this commission that the proposition of M. Kammerlingh 
Onnes to give the name of Carnot to the unit of entropy has been 
referred. i 
This same commission has been likewise charged with the duty of 
fixing the temperatures of condenser and refrigerator, which shall be 
adopted so that the refrigeration capacity of a machine may be 
defined. Section II has only been able to take the following resolu- 
tion on that subject: That the normal capacity of a refrigerating 
machine shall be defined by the number of thermal units it can pro- 
duce in an hour at the given temperatures of the gas at condenser and 
refrigerator, the choice of these temperatures and thermal units to be 
left to the determination of the international commission charged 
with the selection of units. 
As a corollary to these resolutions it is likewise desirable to unify 
the methods of testing refrigerating machines. For this reason 
the following resolution has also been adopted by Section II: That 
the question of simple, practical, and uniform methods of testing 
refrigerating machines, based on the units defined by the interna- 
tional commission and applicable to the different types of machines 
and to different circumstances of installation, shall be made a subject 
of study, with a view to international agreement. 
Cold-storage rooms can be cooled by different methods. In the 
abattoirs one of the most common methods is to direct dry cold air 
into the preserving rooms. This air is brought down to a low tem- 
perature and sufficiently dried out either by passing over a cold 
saline solution (spray refrigerator) or by circulation in contact 
with a coil acting as refrigerant (dry refrigerator). The choice of 
the type of refrigerator, as M. Barrier has said, is a question of cir- 
