4M [Assembly 



Dr. Church — If made perfectly dry, tlien packed in a dry store- 

 room, with a jacket of charcoal arou:.d it — and over an Ice-house, 

 so that the temperature shall be about 40 degrees of Fahrenheit, 

 I think they would keep. 



Chairman requests Mr. Brown to speak on the question. 



D. J. Brown — Experience has proved that fruit is kept sound 

 for some time in a temperature below 45 degrees, but it loses much 

 of its flavor. 



Mr. Pell rather thinks not. I visited a fruit deposit construct- 

 ed apparently on scientific principles ; a large mass of ice over it; 

 the house with a jacket of tan seven or eight inches thick ; walls 

 of brick ; the water of the melting ice well carried off. Apples 

 in barrels with plug holes, temperature at 33 degrees, as nearly 

 as the owner could keep it. A hundred barrels of Newtown pip- 

 pins were stored in it. I tried the apples through the holes and 

 found all rotten that I touched. At 32 degrees they w^ould keep 

 for years. I have known a similar failure. I believe that the 

 small fruits, such as strawberries and others, if put into glass jars 

 and hermetically sealed and then buried five feet deep in the 

 earth, would keep a year or two. A gentleman offered to sell to 

 me his invention for keeping such fruits, and all' others, perfect 

 for a considerable length of time, for one hundred thousand dol- 

 lars. I have not accepted the offer. 



I think, that if these small fruits were put into the hermeti- 

 cally sealed jars, just mentioned, and then in cold water to re- 

 main until that water is heated to boiling, then taken out, the 

 fruit would keep sound ten years. 



Mr. Pell being asked how he managed to have apples every 

 year from the same trees, said by supplying the trees at their 

 roots with those constituents of manure necessary for the deve- 

 lopment of fruit. Naturally the apple-tree, every where- bears 

 only every second year ; and in the barren interval I have seen 

 a case in which I could not gather a single hat-full from a whole 

 orchard. When frost cuts 6ff the fruit the order is changed ; 

 the barren year may become the bearing one, &c. In Germany, 

 grapes are kept by greasing the stem of the bunch where it is 



