Jan.] the hot-house. 91 
the frost; also in very foggy or moist weather, may make a very 
moderate fire to expel the damp, which often proves pernicious to 
some of the more delicate exotics of this department. 
THE HOT-HOUSE. 
Hot-houses or Stoves, are buildings erected for preserving such 
tender exotic plants, natives of the warmer and hottest regions, 
as will not live in the respective countries where they are introduced, 
without artificial warmth in winter. 
Though there are great varieties of these stoves, yet they are 
reducible to two, the dry stove and the bark stove. They are 
both comparatively of modern invention; the first, as far as 1 can 
learn, not having been in use more than one hundred and twenty- 
one years, being introduced by Mr. Watts, gardener at the apothe- 
caries' garden at Chelsea, near London, who in the year 1684, 
contrived flues under his green-house; the latter being much 
posterior, not having been brought into repute till about the year 
1720, when Mr. Le Cour, of Leyden, in Holland, discovered its 
utility for the propagation of the pine apple, which had never before 
been brought to good perfection in Europe. Before the use of 
bark-beds was introduced, all stoves or hot-houses were worked 
by fire-heat only, hence they obtained the name of stoves. 
These stove departments are generally constructed in an oblong 
manner, ranging in a straight line east and west with the glass 
front and roof fully exposed to the south sun, and in dimensions 
may be from fifteen or twenty to fifty or a hundred feet long, by 
twelve or fourteen to sixteen feet wide in the clear, and commonly 
from ten to fourteen feet high in the back wall, by five or six in 
front, including the wall and upright glasses together, and furnished 
with flues round the inside of the front and end walls and in several 
returns in the back wall for fires, and with the whole roof over- 
head sloping to the south entirely of glass work, supported on 
proper cross-bearers. 
Stoves of much more capacious dimensions are frequently erected 
by persons of fortune and curiosity, for the cultivation of the 
taller growing kinds of exotics, which shall be taken due notice 
of after the less expensive and more generally used kinds are 
described. 
The Bark Stove. 
The Bark Stove is so called, as being furnished with an internal 
pit for a bark bed, as well as with flues for fire-heat, and is the 
most universally used, as being the most eligible for the general 
culture of all kinds of the tenderest exotics, as well as for forcing 
several sorts of hardy plants, flowers and fruits to early perfection: 
the bark bed beina; designed to effect a constant moderate moist 
