JAN.] 84 



THE HOT-HOUSE. 



HOT-HOUSES, or STOVES, are buildings erected for pre- 

 serving- such tender exotic plants, natives of the warmer and hot- 

 test 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 

 reducible 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 apothe- 

 caries garden at Chelsea, near London, who, in the year 1684, 

 contrived fines 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 j 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, in- 

 cluding the wall and upright glasses together, and furnished with 

 flues round the inside of the front and end walls, and in several re- 

 twiis 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, 



Swves of much more capacious dimensions, are frequently erect- 

 ed b} per .on s of fortune and curiosity, for the cultivation of the 

 tiller --grow ing kinds of exotics, which shall be taken due notice 

 of, after the less expensive and more generally used kinds are des- 

 cribed. 



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 is 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 fruits to early perfection : 

 the bark-bed being designed 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 j the 



