1921.] 
New Zealand Institute Science Congress. 
45 
land of astronomical equipment and staff made by the Yale University 
Corporation, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A. 
7. That this Congress urges upon the Government the importance of 
taking steps to participate in the determination of the longitude of the 
Hector Observatory by radio-telegraphy from the Greenwich and Paris 
Observatories, as recommended by the Bureau des Longitudes, Paris. 
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS. 
Report of the Food Investigation Board, 1919-20. Department of 
Scientific and Industrial Research, London, 1920, 36 pp. 
The second report of this Board gives an account of certain investigations 
which are of considerable interest to New Zealand, and deals principally 
with the research work undertaken upon the preservation of food by cold. 
The differences in the behaviour in beef and mutton when subjected to 
cold storage have been found to centre around the physical rather than 
the chemical properties. Experiments with pieces of beef of a few pounds 
in weight showed that when beef is frozen by immersion in brine cooled 
to —20° C. the characteristic propensity to drip on thawing was eliminated, 
and, like mutton, to a large extent, it preserved the qualities of fresh meat. 
Experiments, however, upon a commercial scale with quarters of beef to 
reproduce these results were ineffectual. A study of the distribution of 
the nitrogenous compounds in fresh meat showed that the autolysis comes 
to an end in seven or eight days at room-temperature, but for frozen meats 
at —10° C. the rate of change is altered, and at the end of sixteen days— 
the longest period of observation—there was no sign of equilibrium This 
is in no way surprising, for in 1908 W. D. Richardson, and in 1912 the 
reviewer, published results for beef and mutton respectively which showed 
that up to 120 days may be necessary to establish the nitrogenous equili¬ 
brium under cold storage. 
A study of putrefaction is being carried out, and the bacteriological 
conditions investigated. New methods are reported of an accurate and 
simple procedure for estimating the simpler products of bacterial decompo¬ 
sition. A fungus is reported as having been isolated as the cause of 
“ black spot 55 in meat, and has been found to grow and spore at —5° C. 
This fungus develops more rapidly at low temperatures if, before being 
placed in the cold, the meat inoculated with the spores is kept for twenty- 
four hours at ordinary temperature, thus allowing the early stages of 
germination to take place under normal conditions ; growth is very slow 
at low temperatures, but it is greatly enhanced if the temperature is raised 
to 0° C. Several other moulds develop fairly well at freezing-point. 
It is shown that dried blood added in small amounts to the diet of pigs 
causes a remarkable increase in the rate of fattening. 
The ripening process of fruit has been investigated, and the limits of 
temperature within which fruit-moulds will grow have been ascertained. 
The Engineering Sub-Committee has studied the question of efficiency 
in the common insulating-materials, and the laws governing heat-trans¬ 
mission from the walls of a room to the air ; experiments on refrigerator 
cars and barges for carrying frozen meats have been made, and trial runs 
have been made. 
A. process for the synthesis of gtycerol is reported, and the physiological 
properties of fats in which glycerol has been replaced by other polyhydric 
alcohols have been investigated. 
