Dec. 1896.] 



GENERAL AGRICULTURAL NOTES. 



303 



England some of the early soft and perishable fruits. The 

 request came rather late in the season, and at the time no 

 provision could be made in the way of a special compartment 

 for transporting these fruits; and the Minister of Agriculture 

 further carefully explained to the delegation who waited on him 

 that no further appropriation could at the time be set aside. 

 The appropriation already voted was for the purpose of trans- 

 porting butter ; but if the fruit growers cared to accept the 

 situation as it stood, and if they were willing to substitute a 

 shipment of fruit for a shipment of butter, for wdiich the com- 

 partments were originally designed, he would raise no objection. 

 This was done, and a shipment of fruits, consisting of pears, 

 peaches, plums, grapes, tomatoes, and apples, was made. These 

 fruits were carefully selected in ihe Niagara and Grimsby 

 districts, each specimen being wrapped in paper and put in 

 small packages and forwarded to Montreal from Winona by 

 refrigerator car. Unfortunately, the car did not arrive in 

 Montreal in a sufficiently cool condition for the proper preserva- 

 tion of the fruits. The ice had disappeared, and ihe fruit was- 

 comparatively warm. It was immediately cooled with ice and 

 salt, placed in a compartment on board the steamer, and 

 shipped to England under the best conditions available at that 

 time. The more tender fruit did not, however, arrive there in a, 

 satisfactory condition, for the peaches, plums, and grapes suffered 

 considerably. The pears and tomatoes arrived in somewhat 

 better state. Forty cases of early fall varieties, more or less 

 perishable kinds of apples, such as the St. Lawrence and 

 Alexander, were shipped from Montreal in cases 10 inches deep, 

 12 inches wide, and 20 inches long, each holding about a busheL 

 They were sold by auction in Liverpool, and netted a little over 

 a dollar (4s. 2d.) a box, so that, as far as the apples were 

 concerned, the shipment gave good returns. The growers, at 

 any rate, were quite satisfied. 



The principal condition militating against the successful car- 

 riage of the pears and peaches was that the refrigerator compart- 

 ment did not afford a sufficiently low temperature to prevent the 

 germs of fermentation from developing and multiplying. The 

 process of fermentation having been started in the heated car, it 

 was developed by the fruit being packed in these tightly closed 

 packages with too high a temperature. 



The Canadian Government defrayed the freight as well as the 

 cold storage expenses, although they had not originally agreed to 

 bear more than the loss of the latter, so that the only cost to 

 the growers was the fruit and the labour of packing. The 

 returns from the fruit which was sold more than defrayed the 

 cost of the packages, so that the growers were not out of 

 pocket, as they had at first expected to be. 



