Portable Steam-Engines. — Certificates have been shown us that prove the value of the 

 portable steam-engines. One farmer asserts that he has threshed one hundred bushels of 

 oats per hour, and can readily thresh and clean over two hundred bushels of wheat per day. 

 Another says five hundred bushels, and that he has threshed, and cleaned, and put into 

 bags, at the rate of one bushel per minute. For farm work, this engine is most valuable, 

 and no less so for irrigation, which it can be employed to do when there is no other work 

 on hand. 



With the mowers and reapers, the steam-engine, the lawn-mower, gas-works, and so forth, 

 we now want a race of fawjiers, educated at agricultural colleges, to direct this machinery 

 to the best advantage. 



The New York Horticcltural Society has resolved to extend to the Pomological Society 

 the usual hospitalities on the occasion of its next meeting in that city. 



QpAiNT AND True. — Good, honest John Evelyn published, in 1686, his Kalendar, or Gar- 

 deners^ Almanac, with the following introduction : " As Paradise (though of God's own plant- 

 ing) was Paradise no longer than the man was put into it, to dress it and to keep it ; so, 

 nor will our own gardens remain long in their perfection, unless they are also continually 

 cultivated. But when we have so much celebrated the life and felicity of a gardener as to 

 think it preferable to all other diversions whatsoever, it is not because of the leisure which 

 he enjoys above other men, ease and opportunity which minister to vain and inglorious 

 delights, such as fools derive from sensual objects; we dare boldly pronounce it, there is not 

 amongst men a more laborious life than is that of a good gardener's ; but, because a labor 

 full of tranquillity and satisfaction, natural and instructive, and such as (if any) contributes 

 to piety and contemplation, experience, health, and longevity. In some, a condition it is, 

 furnished with the most innocent, laudable, and purest of earthly felicities, and such as 

 does certainly make the nearest approaches to that blessed state where only they enjoy all 

 things without pains ; so as those who were led only by the light of nature, because they 

 could phansie none more glorious, thought it worthy of entertaining the souls of heroes and 

 most illustrious of mortals. * * A gardener's work is never at an end ; it begins with 

 the year, and continues to the next ; he prepares the ground, and then he sows it ; after 

 that he plants, and then he gathers the fruits ; but, in all the intermediate space, he is 

 careful to dress it. Intolerable confusion will succeed the smallest neglect, after once a 

 ground is in order." 



The Index, &c., has fallen like a bombshell into our camp, and deranged the regular form' 

 of the present number, obliging us to omit much matter prepared. Happily, indexes, those 

 useful articles for the future, do not come as often as house-cleaning time ; if they did, 

 garrulous editors would be so frequently in dilemmas, that they would give it up. 



f 0rticultural ^otieti^s. 



Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. — The following comprises the premiums awarded 

 by the Society at the Twenty-Kighth Autumual Exhibition, held at Peun Square on the 16th, 

 17th, and 18th of September, 1856 : — 



Collection of Plants. — Collection of twenty — pots not exceeding sixteen inches in diameter, 

 at least one-half to be in bloom, open for private collections only, $20, John Pollock, gr. to 

 J. Dundas ; second, $15, Mark Hill, gr, to M. W. Baldwin ; third, $10, T. Robertson' gr. to 

 ^' A. Fahnestock ; fourth best, $8, J. J. Habermeld, gr. to J. Lambert. Collection o/twenttj, 



