FROST INSTEAD OF HEAT.

Tuapeka Times, Volume V, Issue 242, 19 September 1872, Page 5

FROST INSTEAD OF HEAT.

{From tli( Melbourne Telegraph.)

The idea that haunts our inventors is to send Home frozen joints instead of meat in tins :to use Frost instead of Heat. Nature works with ice and cold when she wishes to preserve animals, and the way to utilise our nocks and herds is, it is fondly believed, to follow in her footsteps. Now that we have freezing-machines there would seem, at first sight, to be little difficulty, for the hold of a ship ought to be a capital refrigerator, and indeed the experiment has been tried on a large scale ia America. Texas h&i its vast herds, and is anxious to find a market, and a shipload of beef was scut last summer to Philadelphia, stowed in a hold, where, by means of ice, a temperature just about freezing point was maintained. The meat (says the Rhode Island Press of 23rd March) was landed "in perfect order and entirely sweet," but as the experiment was not repeated, the presumption is that it did not pay. This same difficulty has beset Messrs Mort and Nicolle, wbo have been laboring for a dozen years at Sydney to solve the difficulty, encouraged always by sympathy and sometimes by subscription*. They could freeze the meat, bnt not at the price ; bnt they seem how to have made a considerable advance to economy and success. An account in the Empire of a visit to their experimental freezing-room states : —

" The frigidity was remarkable. The human breath poured from the mouth like a cloud of steam. On advancing and at the end was found a considerable quantity of meat— such as legs of mutton, Ac. — looking as fresh as a daisy, though they had been placed in the receptacle for a month. There were turkeys and geese, which, on being rapped with the knuckle.", were as bard as petrifactions ; pi >ver and curlew and native game, in feather, a? fresh as on the day they fell to the gun of the sportsman, with heaps of oysters and baskets of eggs swathed in i ;e, and in perfect condition. A mullet that bad been kept some months was as hard as a piece of marble, and the degree of rigidity imparted by the process to a small gnardfish may be gathered from the fact that Mr Nicolle broke a block of ice .with it at one sharp blow. The pipes were covered with a deep hoar-frost, sparkling in the candlelight like window-panes of cottages on wintry mornings in northern climes." Mr Nicolle asserts that ten tons of fuel will make enough cold to freeze a shipload all the way to England ; and this is the test point of his plan. If he is correct there will be a long good-bye to chemical preparations, and the Australian steak will be laid on the London breakfast table as fresh, young, and nutritious as though the beast had been slain the one day at Smith field, instead of three months back, 14,000 miles away at Flemington. And what a sight the frozen hold of ship will be ! And how common-place Swift's satire of obtaining sunbeams from cucumbers appea's, contrasted with ice for a voyage from ten tons of oaL