302 ON THE CULTURE OF THE POTATO. 



POSTSCRIPT. 



March 23, 1829. Somewhat contrary to my expectations, the produce 

 of the small early potato exceeded very considerably that of the large 

 one above mentioned ; being per acre 665 bushels of 82 pounds. It is 

 usually calculated by farmers that eighty pounds of potatoes, though 

 eaten raw, after they have begun to germinate, will afford two pounds of 

 pork ; and I doubt much if the haulm, and the whole of the manure 

 made by the hogs, were restored to the ground, whether it would be in 

 any degree impoverished. I am not satisfied that it would not be 

 enriched, an important subject for consideration in a country of which 

 the produce is at present unequal to support its inhabitants, and which 

 produce is, I confidently believe and fear, growing gradually less, whilst 

 the number of its inhabitants is rapidly increasing. 



LXV. ON THE CULTIVATION OF THE PINE-APPLE. 



[Read before the HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, Aug. IVth, 1828.] 



I HAVE now completed a long course of experiments upon the culture 

 of the pine-apple in the dry stove, the object of which has been to ascer- 

 tain the means by which that species of fruit might be most advan- 

 tageously grown, and particularly at those periods of the year when the 

 scarcity of other fruits gives it an additional value. In these experiments 

 I have endeavoured to ascertain the effects of excess of drought and of 

 moisture, and of very high and of very low temperature. I have, of 

 course, sacrificed many plants in experiments which I neither found nor 

 expected to find successful ; but from these I have derived information 

 which I believe will prove useful to the cultivators and advantageous to 

 the consumers of that species of fruit *. 



The effects of a very dry atmosphere necessarily were an inspissated 



* I have, in a communication last year to the Horticultural Society, shown that the mould in 

 pots circumstanced as those which contain my pine-apple plants are, acquires a temperature 

 very nearly equal to that of the aggregate temperature of the air in the house, but not subject to 

 such extensive variations. Thus, if the highest temperature of the air within the house during 

 the day be 90 and the lowest during the night be 70, the temperature of the mould in the 

 pots will nearly approximate the arithmetical mean 80 : and surely the intelligent gardeners 

 of the present day must be fully sensible that mould at eighty degrees is warm enough without 

 the aid of the irregular and ungovernable heat of a bark-bed, whatever their ignorant prede- 

 cessors who first introduced the bark -bed into the pine-stove may have thought. 



