Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/516

502 before the weather will permit unloading. Either the closeness of the air beneath tightly battened hatches or the heat of midsummer weather causes the rapid ripening of the fruit, and it may be the case at either season that when the ship is unloaded there is found a mass of ripe and decayed fruit which will not pay the cost of its transportation. Thus the shipper's lot is likely to be by no means a happy one, and the success of a trip may depend largely on the skill and judgment of the shipmaster.

Fruit which arrives in good condition is transferred by wagons to cool and dark storehouses to ripen, or by rail to interior markets with the utmost dispatch. One may often see a fruiter just arrived at her pier in one of our large seaports, by whose side lies a huge scow bearing freight cars, into which the green bunches are being rapidly passed and stowed for transportation hundreds of miles inland.

And so, throughout the year, the work goes on, affording profitable occupation to people who need it and healthful variety to tables that welcome it. Surely the story of one of the choicest products of Nature's laboratory can not be without interest where that of every result of human ingenuity finds so large an audience.



N the death of Prof. Tyndall science has lost one of its greatest modern leaders, and the century one of its most striking personalities. In early life he became prominent as an original investigator, and later he was even more distinguished as a popular scientific teacher. Probably no man of his time did more toward freeing science from the shackles of ecclesiasticism, and vindicating its claims to public regard. With less than the usual advantages of birth or position, he rose by sheer force of character and natural ability to the headship of one of the foremost scientific institutions of learning and research in the world, the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Here, as Professor of Physics, which appointment he received in 1853, he continued those original researches which had already made his name familiar in scientific circles, and subsequently, on the death of Faraday, he succeeded to the directorship of the institution.

His researches in physics embraced magnetism, electricity, light, heat, and sound, the latter including a long series of experiments on the atmosphere as a vehicle of sound, with a view to the