Fresh fruit from the antipodes, of which two large consignments have recently reached London, is now being daily sold to eager purchasers in the Australian fruit-market at the Indian and Colonial Exhibition. Grapes, apples, pears, and other fruits, in splendid condition, and with their flavour unaltered by their long separation from their parent stems, can now be conveyed by the shipload, packed in cool chambers, in the same way that meat is imported from the same distant lands. The success of the enterprise opens up a wide field of promise to those in temperate lands who have been dazzled by the reports of travellers as to the luscious nature of foreign fruits, which hitherto have been quite out of reach of stay-at-home Britons. We seem to be fast coming to the time when fairy tales will be considered tame and uninteresting, from being so far eclipsed by current events. A correspondent of the _Times_ notes a most important means of escape from suffocation by smoke, a fatality by which many lives are lost annually. He points out that if a handkerchief be placed beneath the pillow on retiring to rest so as to be within easy reach of the hand, it can, in case of an alarm of fire, be readily dipped in water and tied over the mouth and nostrils. As an amateur fireman, he has gone through the densest smoke protected in that manner, and he alleges that such a respirator will enable its wearer to breathe freely in an otherwise irrespirable atmosphere. Professor Dewar lately exhibited at the Royal Institution, London, the apparatus he employs for the production of solid oxygen. If we refer to the physical text-books of only three or four years back, we find oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen described as permanent gases, for no one had ever produced either in any other form. At length all three had to give way before scientific research, and they were by special appliances reduced to the liquid state. Professor Dewar is the first experimenter who has taken the further step of producing one of these gases in a solid form. His method consists in allowing liquid oxygen to expand into a partial vacuum, when the great absorption of heat which accompanies the operation causes the liquid to assume a solid state. It is said to resemble snow in appearance, with a temperature greatly below the freezing-point of water. It is believed that a means of producing such a degree of cold will be of great service to experimental chemistry.