Jan.] THE HOT-HOUSE. yj 



the frost; also in very foggy or moist weather, may make a very 

 moderate fire to expel the damp, which often proves pernicious to 

 some of the more delicate exotics of this department. 



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 

 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 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 departmentsare 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, b\ 

 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 over- 

 head 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 beins; 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 lor Forcing 

 several sorts of hardv plants, flowers and fruits to early perfection: 

 the bark bed being designed to effect a constant moderate moist 



