33—1846.] 
THE GARDENERS' 
CHRONICLE. 
547 
RIED PLANTS FROM CHINA.—A few sets of 
the VALUABLE DRIED PLANTS collected in Ohina 
by Mr. Fonruwr, may still be procured by applying to R. 
Hewanp, Esq., Young-street, Kensington, London. Amon; 
them are many new and rare species scarcoly known to Euro- 
peans, 
CHOICE FLOWER-SEEDS. 
Bass & BROWN particularly recommend the fol- 
lowing, which have been carefully saved from numerous 
varieties of superior and first-rate flowers :— 
q6 
Per packet—: 
8. d. 
Gineraria .. me) 0 | Ranunculus 
Fuchsia .. ++ «+1 0| Heartsease vi enel 
Geranium 4 .. 2 6| Alstræmeria, from Van 
Petunia .. AE a A, ïoutte’s beautiful vars. 1 6 
o miany others for present sowing, for which see their 
advertisements in the Gardeners Chronicle, dated July 11 and 
18. Sent free by post at the prices affixed, with useful direc- 
tions for sowing and treatmen: 
A remittance, from unknown correspondents is requested. 
Post-office orders must be made payable to WrnLrAM Bass and 
8. Brown, 
. Seed and Sudbury, Suffolk, 
HE LATE DESTRUCTIVE HAILSTOR 
A Public Meeting will be held at the London Tavern, 
Bishopsgate-strect on Monday, August 17, his Royal Highness 
the Duke of Cambridge, K.G., in the chair, to devise the best 
Means of alleviating the distress and preserving from ruin those 
Norsrrymen and Fronrsrs in the neighbourhood of the metro- 
Polis who have suffered from the violence of the late dreadful 
Hailstorm.—The right hon, the Lord Mayor, and several influ- 
ential Noblemen and Gentlemen have promised to attend, His 
Royal Highness will take the chair at one precisely. 
1 ommuni aana tobe addressed to 
T. NEVILLE, Sec., Royal South London Floricultural 
Society, 
E. R CUTLER, Sec., Gardeners’ Benevolent Institution, 
Honorary Secretaries, pro tem., 
Committee Room. of the Royal South London Floricultural 
Society, Horns Tavern, Kennington. 
The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 
cannot fail to be read with the greatest interest, for 
the importance of the facts and laws they refer to 
can hardly be over-estimated. 
* When I first ventured to address your readers on 
the subject of the Polmaise mode of heating, I pre- 
dicted the suecess of the principles on which it rested, 
with a certainty, which in the opinion of many, verged 
on presumption, especially when it was evident that my 
views were opposed by practical men who had staked 
their great reputation on the failure of Polmaise. 
* The laws of philosophy, as expounded by the investi- 
gations of modern science, are no trifling warrant for 
a firm expression of opinion, as to the’ power of certain 
means to accomplish certain ends ; but they are not in- 
fallible guides—daily investigation leads to new expo- 
sitions of them, the wisdom of to-day is the ignorance 
of to-morrow; still, though I appealed to the laws 
of moderm science, to prove that Polmaise offered 
every earnest of success, it will be remembered I rested 
my predictions on surer grounds; I referred to the 
laws that never vary, the guide that never leads astray 
when rightly understood, and they pronounced -these 
principles to be the only true ones for the diffusion of 
atmospheric heat; and that Polmaise would triumph, 
was not mine, but Nature’s verdict. 
** Your assertion at the opening of the year was, in- 
deed, prophetic, ‘that there were far more important 
considerations than the form of a boiler, or adaptation 
of a pipe’; and it is with feelings of no ordinary 
pleasure that I now announce to your readers, that 
those principles for which I have contended have, when 
applied in a most simple form, realized all my expecta- 
tions. My prediction is verified with * Nature's means. 
I have attained her ends’; and, even more than 
this, for I have found them not only adapted to produce 
heric heat, but also bottom-heat. 
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 1846. 
COUNTRY SHOW. 
FuinAv, Aug. 28—Perthshire Horticultural. 
Ir will not have been forgotten by our readers 
that we some months since presumed to invade the 
territories of the Horwarer NATION ; that we pro- 
posed to depose their monarch, and enthrone in 
his place an Air-king; and that thereupon the 
loyal Hotwaters boiled up with indignation greater 
than could be well expressed, except in the angry 
Voice of a tea-kettle. It was in vain that we begged 
the Hotwaters to be reasonable; to listen to argu- 
ment, and look at evidence; and to consider how 
much better for them it would be to have an active 
Prince who cost them little, instead of a sluggish 
800d sort of person who ruined them with exac- 
tions. Butthe Hotwaters would not listen. They 
Were contented with their favourite and his slug- 
ishness ; they had no fancy to exchange King 
403 for King Stork; and as for reason that was out 
of the way of most of them, nor could they see the 
use of it. 
To be serious—much in this manner was met our 
Second attempt to bring into use the ingenious plan 
of heating garden buildings by the motion of warm 
air, to which, in consequence of its having been 
successfully applied at Polmaise, near Stirling, the 
name of that village was given. It was urged that 
to heat a church was not to heata Vinery. When 
it was shown that a Vinery had been heated, and 
Successfully, it was contended firstly, that it was 
not heated at all; secondly, that if it was heated 
no reliance could be placed on the heating power ; 
thirdly, that it was very expensive; and, fourthly, 
that the same plan had been tried somewhere else 
and failed, but where, or how, was not shown. It 
Was further alleged that the Polmaise system of 
eating by currents of warm air was contrary to 
Principle ; that it was absurd to talk of warm air 
escending into cold drains, and that all who tried 
© experiment would meet with disappointment. 
All the experience of smoky chimneys, in which 
Warm air does descend into cold rooms, was for- 
Sotten in order to destroy Polmaise. 
t was clear to us that no advantageous result 
Would arise from continuing a discussion under 
Such circumstances, for 
** Man convinced against his will, 
Is of the same opinion still.” 
We therefore left the matter to time and experi- 
ence, with an entire confidence in the issue. Nor 
ave we been disappointed. 
It.will be remembered that our valuable corres- 
Pondent, Mr. Merx, who took so active a part in 
€ discussion to which we have alluded, announced 
“Us intention of applying the principle of Polmaise- 
h ting to astove about to be constructed for him- 
Self." He has done so; we have examined the 
house, its arrangemeut, and its working, and we 
‘ave now to state that the soundness of the princi- 
ples on which he relied in his very able advocacy of 
the system is placed beyond cavil. His apparatus 
38 so simple, cheap, and effectual, both for air-heat 
and bottom-heat, that we regard the days of hot- 
Water as. numbered, except, perhaps, in. certain 
Gases which will be mere: exceptions. The follow- 
ng remarks, with which Mr: Muzw has favoured us; 
E 
9 My new hothouse is a span roof, 28 feet long by 
18 wide; in the centre is a brick enclosure as for an 
ordinary bark bed, 22 feet 6 in. long, 9 feet wide ; in 
place of being filled with tan, it is chambered with iron 
supports and slates for two-thirds of its depth, much as 
though the heat were to be supplied by hot-water 
troughs ; on the slate rests a layer of pebbles, on these 
a foot of tan, simply as a plunging material. The cold 
air passes below the level of the floor into the stove 
chamber, becomes heated from sweeping over an 
extended iron plate, passes over a surface of water 
on its passage back, enters the chamber beneath 
the tan bed, and then escapes through ventilators 
amongst the general air of the house. When the 
foot of tan was placed upon the pebbles, its tempe- 
rature was about that of the day—74°F.; the fire was 
lighted about 8 o'clock in the evening ; the tan gradually 
rose in the space of 24 hours to 96°F. and between this 
and 93? it has remained ; the atmospherie temperature 
the same night was raised as high as 809; during the 
whole time, 10 ventilators, each admitting 8 inches of 
external air, remained open; the quantity. of fuel em- 
ployed was ineredibly small, the very slowest combustion 
only was maintained, as may bebelieved, when I state that 
about one-third of what the furnace will contain was 
employed, and that this remained unreplenished for 20 
hours,the size of the furnace being similar to what 
would have been employed had the house been heated 
with a ribbed boiler. The calorie evolved from the 
fuel was so fully made available, that the open hand 
could be laid on the damper, though near the fire. After 
this slow fire had been maintained for three days and 
nights, it was allowed to expire, and the ventilators 
closed ; the temperature of the house ascended several 
degrees, and in 30 hours the heat in the tan had only 
declined 2°.. Lest even one foot of tan should interfere 
by fermentation with these experiments, one portion of 
the bed was covered only three inches deep; in this 
another thermometer indicated the same temperature. 
“These are facts. How are they accomplished? In the 
same way that Nature works when she desires to raise 
atmospheric temperature, namely by making the air she 
wishes to heat pass over a heated surface; not bj 
carrying the heat to the air, but the air to the heat); 
and so, to compare small things with great, I have m; 
tropical region, with the air I desire to heat, constantly 
blowing over it, returning back in its heated form, 
passing over a surface of water at pleasure, to charge 
itself with moisture, communicating its heat to the 
plunging bed, and passing with the residue iuto the 
general air of the house again to make the same revolu- 
tion when cooled down. 
*]tisno matter of wonder that the same meansaccom- 
plish the same ends, both in art and nature ; but how 
strange it is that man, instead of learning from so good 
an instruetress, should have employed an agent to 
raise atmospheric temperature, which Providencenever 
intended for any such purpose: the costly, cumbrous 
machinery of boilers, pipes, stopcocks, heated tanks and 
cisterns, form no portion of Nature's simple means, at 
least, they have hitherto remained undiscovered; but the 
equator, with itsabund: fabsorbedradi lori 
the gaseous atmosphere, ever “restless, because never 
equal in temperature, the broad sea, these are Nature's 
simple though mighty means of diffusing atmospheric 
heat and moisture, and though neither sun, nor earth, nor 
air, nor sea is under our command; still Nature's pupil 
reads her book, learns her lessons, imitates, though 
afar off, her works, explains and applies her principles, 
benefits his fellow creatures, and looks in admiration 
from the design up to the Great Designer.” 
t 
occasion of its being applied near London. ]t has 
not even proved subject to the accidental failures 
usually experienced- on the first application of novel 
plans ; on the contrary, its action is perfect, and it 
does more than was promised for it, for it commu- 
nicates bottom heat as well as air heat, and, in fact, 
does all that the most complicated and costly hot- 
water apparatus can effect. 
So muchroom has already been occupied by cor- 
respondents who have cavilled at this plan of heat- 
ing, that we trust to be excused by them, as we 
most assuredly shall beby the publie, if we regard 
their case as closed. Mr. Murray, of Polmaise, and 
Mr. Merx, of Nutfield, will soon be universally 
regarded as the founders of a method of heating 
garden buildings as superior to hot water as the 
latter was to steam, and as steam was to flues. 
Fig. 1. Section of house, showing hot-air chamber, air flues, 
furnace, cistern, and direction of currents, 5 d 
Fig. 2, Section through hot-air chamber, showing chimney, 
furnace, fire-place, and ash-pit. : 
Fig. 3. Plan of hot-air chamber; aa a, cold air entrances, 
which may be closed at pleasure. B, opening from hot-air 
chamber into house, T 
The constructors of hothouses will now have to 
turn their most serious attention to the manner 
of applying. Polmaise to the varying demands 
of their customers. Indeed, the enterprising 
firm of Bursince and Heaty, in Fleet-street, is al 
ready in the field with the following plan :—It is’ 
proposed to construct a fireplace with plates of iron 
bolted together, as is.seen at Fig. 2. These plates . 
will form a vaulted roof, through which no gaseous 
matters can possibly pass into the house, and it is 
expected that they will rapidly raise the tempera- 
ture of the chamber in which they are placed. 
In order to avoidithe inconvenience of fuel lying in 
contact with metal plates, a bed of fire-brick is 
provided, in which the fuel shall be all consumed, 
and theiron plates themselves rest on the edge of 
that bed, out ofcontact with the fire, For the wet 
blanket used at Polmaise a. cistern of water (see 
We have thus before us an example of the perfect: 
success of the Polmaise system on the very first 
fig. 1), is substituted, as Mr. Merx formerly recom- 
mended, the warm air sweeping over which becomes 
