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XXI. On the Management of Hothouse Flues, so as to keep 

 up a nearly equal Temperature during the Night. In a 

 Letter to the Secretary. By the Rev. George Swayne, 

 Corresponding Member of the Horticultural Society. 



Read February 1, 1825. 



Dear Sir, 



.As often as I cast my eyes on the following admonitions* 

 of my Gardening Directory viz. " His last examination of 

 the furnace for the evening, should not be earlier than ten 

 o'clock." — " He ought to be again at the fire within seven 

 hours of the leaving it." — "Attend punctually to the furnace 

 in the afternoon, late at night, and timely in the morning. 

 Between five and nine in the forenoon never let the course 

 of fire heat relax," — I feel pity for those among the successors 

 to the primitive employment of our first parents, who have to 

 attend to the modern refinements now very generally attached 

 to that employ, namely, the forcing department and the culture 

 of exotics. Whilst the rest of the servants of an establishment 



* These admonitions refer to the method of heating stoves by flues; but that 

 of heating by steam is not less subject to the inconvenience of night attendance, 

 as I understand from a letter of Mr. James Dodds (Vol. iii. of the Caledonian 

 H. S:s Memoirs, page 1 24) addressed to Mr. Hay, the contriver of his apparatus, 

 wherein he tells him that in order to keep up the heat of his house to 60° he made 

 up the fire to the boiler at 10 o'clock at night, and 6 o'clock in the morning; the 

 substitution of the latter method, therefore, for the former, however preferable m 

 other respects, would not less break in upon the gardener's rest by night. 



f Abercrombie's Practical Gardener, by Mean, page 612-13. 



