Not so long ago there arrived at a Pacific port a ship from Belfast, Ireland, after a voyage that was in one respect remarkable. It appears that this vessel’s ballast consisted of about 2,000 tons of Irish soil. This, when leveled off, made a pretty good-sized garden patch, and the members of the crew, with commendable thrift, took it into their heads to improve it.
They planted a good stock of garden truck—cabbages, leeks, turnips, radishes, peas, beans, lettuce and other things. These came up in due course, and flourished admirably, especially while the ship was in the tropics, and the men had fresh “garden sass” to their hearts’ content.
As they rounded Cape Horn they replanted the garden, and by the time they reached the equator everything was again green and the table well supplied.
The two drawbacks were the weeds, which grew apace, and the inroads of the ship’s drove of pigs, which were kept in the “farm-yard attachment,” and which, on several occasions, when the ship was rolling heavily, broke out of bounds and, of course, did their best to obtain their share of the garden truck.
The last pig was killed and served with green vegetables just before the vessel entered the port on the Pacific. On the arrival of the ship the sod was taken to its destination, ready to be used again for terrestrial gardening.—Harper’s Weekly.
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A public sentiment that fluctuates irregularly can be as little depended upon in making progress as the sun’s energy noted in the following:
The energy falling upon an ordinary city lot should run continuously a hundred-horse-power plant. If all the coal deposits in Pennsylvania were burned in one second, they would not produce as much power as the sun furnishes us in the same time. The difficulty in the practical utilization of the solar energy lies in its extreme variability. In the morning and afternoon, when the sun is low in the heavens, but a small amount of energy reaches the surface, and even at noon a passing cloud will absorb the greater part of the solar radiation.—Charles Lane Poor, “The Solar System.”