104 THE HOT-HOUSE. [JAN, 



THE HOT-HOUSE. 



Hot-houses or Stoves, are buildings erected for preserving such 

 tender exotic plants, natives of the warmer and hottest regions, as 

 will not live in the respective countries where they are introduced, 

 without artificial warmth in winter. 



Though there are great varieties of these stoves, yet they are re- 

 ducible to two, the dry stove and the bark stove. They are both 

 comparatively of modern invention ; the first, as far as I can learn, 

 not having been in use more than one hundred and twenty-one years, 

 being introduced by Mr. Watts, gardener at the apothecaries' garden 

 at Chelsea, near London, who in the year 1684, contrived flues under 

 his green-house ; the latter being much posterior, not having been 

 brought into repute till about the year 1720, when Mr. Le Cour, of 

 Leyden, in Holland, discovered its utility for the propagation of the 

 pine-apple, which had never before been brought to good perfection 

 in Europe. Before the use of bark-beds was introduced, all stoves 

 or hot-houses were worked by fire-heat only, hence they obtained the 

 name of stoves. 



These stove departments are generally constructed in an oblong 

 manner, ranging in a straight line east and west with the glass front 

 and roof fully exposed to the south sun, and in dimensions may be 

 from fifteen or twenty to fifty or a hundred feet long, by twelve or 

 fourteen to sixteen feet wide in the clear, and commonly from ten to 

 fourteen feet high in the back wall, by five or six in front, including 

 the wall and upright glasses together, and furnished with flues round 

 the inside of the front and end walls and in several returns in the 

 back wall for fires, and with the whole roof overhead sloping to the 

 south entirely of glass-work, supported on proper cross-bearers. 



Stoves of much more capacious dimensions are frequently erected 

 by persons of fortune and curiosity, for the cultivation of the taller 

 growing kinds of exotics, which shall be taken due notice of after the 

 less expensive and more generally used kinds are described. 



THE BARK STOVE. 



The Bark Stove is so called, as being furnished with an internal 

 pit for a bark bed, as well as with flues for fire-heat, and was formerly 

 the most universally used, as being the most eligible for the general 

 culture of all kinds of the tenderest exotics, as well as for forcing 

 several sorts of hardy plants, flowers and fruit to early perfection ; 

 but its complex arrangements may now be dispensed with by the 

 more simple and efficient hot-water apparatus ; the bark being de- 

 signed to effect a constant moderate moist heat all the year round, 

 and the flues used occasionally for fire- heat in winter or during cold 

 weather, to produce such an additional warmth in the internal air 

 as may be requisite at that season; the bark bed is productive of a 

 uniform moderate growing heat of long duration, and was considered 

 to be adapted for the reception and growth of the most tender exotics, 



