While I am waiting for my thermometer, I must do my best by browning pieces of white paper, and "learning by experience."

8. Time-table for canning. Mrs. Jane S. McKimmon of Raleigh, N.C., sent us this time-table to help our Canning Club. We sent to Mr. 0. H. Benson, States Relation Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C., for full directions about our Canning Club.

(A heavy pack of peaches such as those that are layered in glass jars will require a 500 sirup.)

The following vegetables should be processed (boiled) the same length of time on each of three successive days.

Brine is made of 2 1/2 ounces (1/3 cup) of salt to 1 gallon of water. To make sirups recommended, boil sugar and water together in proportions given below:

Sirup #1, use 14 ounces to 1 gallon water. Sirup #2, use 1 pound 14 ounces to 1 gallon water. Sirup #3, use 3 pounds 9 ounces to 1 gallon water. Sirup #4, use 5 pounds 8 ounces to 1 gallon water. Sirup #5, use 6 pounds 13 ounces to 1 gallon water. 1 pint sugar is one pound. A pound is 16 ounces.

9. Canning meat at home. Bulletin No. 101, Vol. V, New York State College, Cornell University Talk about Canning Meat at Home.

Sear the meat or chicken in a hot oven, in hot fat, or in boiling water, and steam it or simmer it until it can be torn apart. Pack the meat into the jars, fill the space with stock, and add one-half teaspoonful of salt to each pint of meat. Sterilize the meat for three hours, in a boiler (page 100). Unless the meat is first browned, it does not have so good a flavor.

10. Starch experiments we like to try. Starch turns a pretty blue color in iodine and water.

1. Grate a piece of potato into a small amount of water, and strain out the pulp. The starch settles from the water in a few minutes. Pour off the water, and add a drop of diluted iodine to the remaining starch. Dilute this mixture and with a dropper tube place a drop upon a slide. We could see the potato starch granules through our microscope.

2. Drop a teaspoonful of dry starch into boiling water.

3. Mix a teaspoonful of starch with a small quantity of cold water, and stir this into boiling water.

4. Mix a teaspoonful of starch with 1/4 cup of cold water, and bring the water to the boiling point, stirring the mixture as it heats.

Why are 3 and 4 similar in result, and different from 2?

5. Test all these with a drop of iodine.

11. Experiments with baking powder. These are the experiments we tried when the Woman's Club met at the school. We liked No. 3 the best of all.

1. Dissolve half a teaspoonful of baking powder in two table-spoonfuls of water and heat in a test tube, or saucepan, over a flame; notice the effervescence when the bubbling is at its height, and hold a lighted match in the mouth of the tube. This is a simple test for carbon dioxide.

2. Dissolve 2 teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar in 1 cup water in a glass.

Dissolve 1 teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda in 1 cup water in a glass.

Taste both of these.

Test both with litmus paper, noting the change of color. There are several vegetable coloring matters that change color in this way, in the presence of an acid or an alkaline substance.

Turn the two solutions together, and test with both blue and pink litmus paper, after the solution has stood for several minutes. What results?

Taste this mixed solution to see if you can detect any difference.

To prove that there is a substance still left, evaporate the water.

3. A pretty form of this experiment is to use, instead of litmus, the water in which red cabbage has previously been boiled, and which, therefore, contains some of the coloring matter of the cabbage. The changes in color are very striking, and prove conclusively that neither the cream of tartar nor the soda remains such.

12. Where does that carbon in the plants come from? When I asked Father how much he paid for the carbon for his plants he said, "Not one penny!" Miss James says that we cannot understand the whole true fairy story until we study biology and botany. It is something like this. Plants breathe through their leaves, and they take in carbon dioxide gas which is in the air. Then in some way the carbon is used in making starch and sugar in the plant. We eat the sugar and starch and so have the carbon. When we study more about physiology and nutrition, we shall understand how it is that we breathe out carbon dioxide gas! And as to the carbon in our coal, it is the carbon that was stored up in plants that lived so many thousand years ago, that we cannot count the years. This we learn about in geology.

13. What does heat do to the foodstuffs?

Protein. There are several forms of protein, with differences that we can understand only after a thorough study of chemistry.

The most important proteins in meat, fish, eggs, milk, old beans, and peas coagulate, or become slightly harder or firmer at a temperature below the boiling point of water. There is no marked chemical change; that is, the protein is not changed to another substance.

Fats. Solid fats are liquefied by heat, and freed from the tissue that contains them in animal fats like suet.

When a fat begins to smoke with heat, a chemical change is taking place. If intense heat is continued, all the hydrogen and oxygen are driven off and pure carbon remains. When the fat is "brown," giving the flavor we like, a part of the oxygen and hydrogen have been driven off. The "boiling" of fat in a kettle is ordinarily due to the boiling of the water contained in the fat.

Starch. Starch occurs in the form of granules. See Fig. 56. In boiling water, the granule expands and finally bursts, and frees the content, the pure starch, and the whole mass thickens.