INTRODUCTION. 
dark and hot, germination becomes eager and profuse. Un- 
fortunately, almost every species differs in the period of drought 
or damp that it requires. At present we are all groping, through 
countless experiences, after clear general laws, and the specific 
application of each. Yet one or two more points may be added 
to help the zealot. Many seeds are greatly stimulated to burst 
their prison by being soaked in hot water for some twenty-four 
hours before sowing. This applies not only to obviously hard- 
shelled seeds like that of Paeonia, but to many alpines, and most 
especially to Gentiana. And again, if delay be protracted, and 
hope in the gardener’s heart be fainting low, an application of 
camphor to the surface will often elicit life, even at the eleventh 
hour, from sluggish and recalcitrant seeds, while in the case of 
extra-precious ones they may be lured into germination between 
sheets of blotting-paper, laid in a warm place, and kept moist one 
day and dry the next. When their life is started, however, they 
require pricking off at once on to a very fine humid surface of soil in 
a pot, and the job is one of such exquisite delicacy as to call for 
the fingers of a fairy. 
THE ALPINE House 
Mention has often here been made of frame and glass house. 
These, if designed solely for the cultivation of alpines, should have 
no heat at all, and be always as light, airy, and well-drained as 
possible. Thus contrived, an alpine house is the richest joy of 
January, besides offering us our only chance of getting full satis- 
faction out of such precocious loveliness as Saaifraga Burservana 
and the little bulbous Irises of Asia Minor, that otherwise spring 
so prematurely from the dead and sodden world, that they are 
almost certain, in the open garden, to be flogged to pieces by 
rain and battered out of their beauty, splashed with mud and 
obliterated, pecked asunder by birds, and nibbled into rags by 
the early rising slug. No pleasure, on the contrary, is greater 
than a clean little house, airy and sweet, filled with clean, un- 
damaged potfuls of Saxifrage, Iris, Adonis, and so forth, all shining 
in untarnished radiance, and developing under protection of the 
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