Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/925

 Popular Science Monthly

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��An Improvised Tree Sprayer and Fire Engine Combined

AT World's End Farm, owned by Mrs. l\, W. W. Blackmar, and situated at Hingham, Massachusetts, are many inter- esting contrivances. Among them is a tank on wheels, used as a fire engine and sprayer combined.

An old twenty-five horsepower automo- bile engine is mounted on a wagon-truck together with a pump and a four hundred and sixty gallon tank. The entire weight is nine thousand, five hundred pounds.

The contrivance was improvised by Mr. C. R. Goodhue, the superintendent of the grounds. It is used for spraying trees, and, in cases of emergency, to put out fires. It throws a spray eighty feet in the air with sufficient force to completely clean the trees of insects and their eggs, leaving germicide solution on the leaves of even the topmost branches. Since this method of spraying the trees has been in use, the production of fruit has considerably increased. During the past year thirty-five thousand gallons of sprayer were used. Disastrous fires have also been eliminated; for with the fire engine right on the premises, a fire is stopped at the very start.

��Grasshoppers Which Fly a Thousand Miles Out at Sea

THE grasshopper would seem to have nothing in common with the seagull, >et grasshoppers have been picked up in swarms at sea, 1,200 miles from the nearest land.

The African grasshopper has been known to cross the Red and Mediterranean seas in destructive numbers and even to fly to the Canary Islands. For the most part these grasshoppers are of a migratory species (Schistocera tartaricd) noted for its great flights. The bodies are about four inches long and are equipped with large air sacs in addition to the usual breathing tubes. These sacs buoy up the insect so that it is able to stay in the air for days at a time, exerting practically no efi'ort at all. During flight its speed varies from three to twenty ^ miles an hour. When it is tired m it rests on the water and is borne fl along on the waves.

���The tree-sprayer fire engine throws a stream eighty feet into the air. For the more strenuous fire-engine duties large open nozzles are used instead of the ordinary spraying nozzles

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