REMARKS ON THE KINDS AND CULTIVATION OP STRAWBERRIES. 363 
are well deserving of every attention as to culture ; it now remains to point out the mode 
by which the finest fruit may be obtained, and to that end it is purposed to consider, 
1 st. The philosophy or rationale on which the present mode of growing Strawberries 
is founded. 
2ndly. To point out the advantages resulting from its adoption, as compared with the 
mode formerly in use. 
3rdly. To detail the course of treatment recommended. 
This will form the subject of a future paper. 
The Philosophy or Rationale upon which the present Mode of cultivating the Strawberry 
is founded. 
In the culture and improvement of those productions of the vegetable and animal king- 
doms which yield sustenance, Providence has widely opened a wide field for the exercise of 
the reason and enterprise of the human race. The wild animals are subdued by kindness 
and stratagem, and labour usefully in our service, or are made to yield the greatest quantity 
of warm material for our clothing, or the most nutritious food according to our requirements ; 
and, not only is man permitted to eat bread by the “ sweat of his brow.” or, in other 
words, to obtain by hard labour the bare necessaries for his existence : but the choicest 
fruits and the fairest flowers are attainable by the exercise of patient perseverance. The 
variety with which nature abounds seems inexhaustible. Our choicest apples are but the 
progeny of the austere crab, and our now magnificent raspberries and strawberries the 
improved races, which the skill of man has raised from the small fruited kinds which 
were originally natives of the wild forests. The original kinds were comparatively worth- 
less ; growing in dense, shady woods, within which the beams of solar light were unable to 
penetrate. To this primaeval state succeeded their cultivation in crowded beds, a mode 
almost as objectionable for its exclusion of light as the tangled thicket, and affording us a 
useful hint, that we must not always blindly follow nature, but that we must make ourselves 
acquainted with general principles and assist her operations. 
Light then is all important in the culture of the strawberry, and, indeed, of all fruits 
whatever; it is only when fully exposed to its action that the leaves of plants perform 
their functions properly — that they perform that most important agency in the economy of 
creation which they were destined to fulfil, by decomposing the noxious carbonic acid gas 
which is given off by the animal world in large quantities, appropriating the carbon for the 
useful products of plants, and giving off the oxygen to combine with the nitrogen, which 
forms our atmosphere for animal respiration. It may here be remarked that this theory 
of emanation of oxygen from the leaves of plants was beautifully illustrated the other day 
by an experiment of Dr. Daubeny’s. It is well known that in pure oxygen all ignited 
substances burn with a peculiar brilliancy. To prove the transpiration of this gas the 
learned professor (with only the aid of the sickly light of a December sun) collected in a 
vessel, the gas given off by some leaves of plants, introducing a taper which was slowly 
burning in the common atmosphere ; it instantly emitted a most brilliant light, showing 
the presence of a larger proportion of oxygen than the common air contained. 
There can be then no doubt of the correctness of this theory, and it is for this reason 
that the finest strawberries are produced by single plants in single rows, say 2 feet 6 
inches apart ; such plants have fine foliage, the surface of which is fully exposed to the 
solar light, and by its action the greatest amount of organisable matter is stored up for the 
production of fruit. 
In every large and well managed garden the crop of strawberry plants should not 
occupy the same plot of ground more than two seasons ; this crop should form part of a 
judicious rotation, and it may be made to do so by annually making a plantation and 
destroying one. This is necessary, not on account of the old theory of excrementitious 
emanation from the roots of plants, but rather because as all plants differ in chemical 
analysis, they each appropriate to themselves certain principles which the soil contains, 
but which in time become exhausted. 
