When vegetables are preserved in vinegar, they form _pickles_. When sugar is the preserving medium, they are variously named according to the mode of preparation. Fruits, flowers, herbs, roots, and juices, boiled with sugar or syrup, and employed in pharmacy, as well as for sweetmeats, are called _confections_ (Latin, _conficere_, to make up). _Liquid confects_ consist of fruits, either whole or in pieces, preserved by immersion in fluid transparent syrup: apricots, green citrons, and some foreign fruits, are treated in this way. _Dry confects_ are prepared by boiling in syrup those parts of vegetables adapted to this method, such as citron and orange-peel, &c.; they are then taken out and dried in an oven. _Marmalades_, _jams_, and _pastes_ are soft compounds made of the pulp of fruits, or other vegetable substances, beaten up with sugar or honey; oranges, apricots, pears, &c., are treated in this way. _Jellies_ are the juices of fruits--currants, gooseberries, apples, &c.--boiled with sugar to such a consistence as, on cooling, to form a trembling jelly. _Conserves_ are dry confects, made by beating up flowers, fruits, &c. with sugar not dissolved. _Candies_ are fruits candied over with sugar, after having been boiled in the syrup. The best syrup for preserving fruits is made by dissolving two parts of double-refined sugar in one part of water, boiling a little, skimming, and filtering through a cloth. This gives a good smooth syrup, which does not readily ferment nor crystallize. The specimens of preserved food in the Great Exhibition were exceedingly numerous; they included animal and vegetable productions, fruits, &c. One interesting specimen was a canister containing boiled mutton, prepared by the exhibitor, Mr. Gamble, for the Arctic Expedition in 1824. A large number of these canisters were landed from the ship _Fury_, on the beach where the ship was wrecked in Prince Regent's Inlet, and were found by Captain Sir John Ross in August, 1833, in a state of perfect preservation, although annually exposed to a temperature of 92° below, and 80° above zero. Had it not been for the large store of provisions left by Parry near the spot where the _Fury_ was wrecked, Ross's expedition must have perished. [Illustration] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Hence the term employed by Liebig and his followers, _eremacausis_, or _slow-burning_.] [Footnote 2: "The colorless, fresh-cut surfaces of a potato, of a turnip, or of an apple, when exposed to the air, soon become brown. In all such substances, the presence of a certain quantity of water, by which the molecules are enabled to move freely on one another, is a condition necessary to the production, by temporary contact with air, of a change in form and composition, a resolving of the original body into new products, which continues uninterrupted till no part of the original compound is left. This process has been distinguished by the name of _putrefaction_."--_Liebig._]