72 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



them from Mexico, Philadelphia, the South of France, and 

 Belgium. I wrote also to Australia, but the Director of the 

 Botanic Gardens at Melbourne informed me that there were 

 no Cacti peculiar to that country, and only such as had been 

 imported. 



By these means I got together about 600 plants of different 

 lands, keeping them in a conservatory well heated with the usual 

 hot-water apparatus. My first trouble was to learn that many 

 plants in such a collection were not Cacti, strictly speaking, such 

 as Stapelias, Gasterias, &c, these being called " succulents." 

 The French appear to be as badly off as we are for a proper 

 term to include all the Cactus family, their title being "les 

 Cactees et les plantes grasses," although very many of these 

 plants have little claim to the latter term. 



To inform myself as to the treatment of my collection, I 

 naturally read all the available books in English on Cactus culti- 

 vation, and was surprised to learn how poor should be the soil 

 for potting these plants, as therein recommended ; however, I 

 naturally followed the advice as closely as possible. In the 

 " Book of the Garden," by Mcintosh, he says : " Succulents grow 

 in the very poorest soil, such as sand or gravel ; thus they are 

 potted in light sandy soil, with a portion of lime rubbish to make 

 it more porous." Mr. Shirley Hibberd says : " It is a mistake to 

 grow them in brick rubbish ; use equal parts of turfy loam and 

 leaf-mould, or fibry peat, and a fourth part of silver sand. This 

 will stand for three years. It is a risk to employ manure." Mr. 

 Croucher says, " Manure should be specially avoided," and he 

 advises " light loam with plenty of sand and brick rubbish. Never 

 use peat ; some cultivators use leaf-mould, but I do not find it 

 good." And the best botanist I had the pleasure of knowing 

 advised me " not to use the sand often found at the roadside after 

 a storm, because there might be horse-manure in it." 



My first doubts as to the value of the above rules came from 

 observing a collection of these plants belonging to a friend, who 

 did not give himself the pleasure of potting them himself, but 

 got a neighbouring gardener, who had the care of several glass 

 houses, to do it for him. This man had read nothing about such 

 plants, and thus thought only of treating them as he did his 

 stove-plants, potting them with the rich soil used in ordinary 

 greenhouse cultivation. I could not help observing that these 



