PRICES OF NURSERY PRODUCTS. 17 



as do a hundred when made by machinery. When it 

 conies to the manual operations, necessary in the propa- 

 gating and growing of greenhouse plants, the same waste 

 of labor is apparent. Our average propagator will take off, 

 make and set in bench 2,000 cuttings per day ; at the rate 

 I saw the propagators of two of the leading establishments 

 in London working, when there a few years ago, I doubt 

 if the average was 500 a day, and when we tell them that 

 some of our crack workmen can place 10,000 rooted cut- 

 tings in pots in ten hours, they honestly think it false, for 

 probably not more than one-half of that number has ever 

 been done in the same time there. I do not wish to be 

 understood as saying that the English gardener cannot 

 move as rapidly as the American can, but custom there 

 clogs his hands with unnecessary work, to accomplish 

 the object desired. The other day a man of forty years of 

 age presented himself to me, with credentials from a 

 long-established Edinburgh firm, stating him to be an 

 experienced propagator and cultivator of plants. To test 

 his capabilities, I handed him a lot of Kose cuttings to 

 prepare, every one of which he cut at an eye or joint, in 

 the approved orthodox style of a half a century ago ; 

 all propagators of experience here have long known that 

 this is not only a great waste of materials, but a still 

 greater waste of time, and we never do it unless in par- 

 ticular cases that very rarely occur. I might mention 

 scores of similar operations which are performed abroad 

 in a manner which seems to us as primitive as this. 



Those who have studied the subject, tell us that from 

 the specimens of the "stone period," at the Smithsonian 

 Institution at Washington, there is reason to believe that 

 it took some thousands of years for our "rude fore- 

 fathers " to discover that the handles could be better fas- 

 tened to their hammers of stone, by drilling a hole through 

 them, than by lashing them to the handles with thongs ; 

 and it is a matter of not very ancient history, that in 



