London. He tended it carefully, but the London atmosphere was 
most unfavorable, and one by one his plants died. One day he 
discovered a sphinx-moth cocoon, and, wishing to see it hatch, 
put it in a glass bottle containing some rich, damp loam and 
covered with a piece of tin. To his surprise, in a few weeks a 
young fern and a small grass plant appeared and continued to 
grow in the bottle, although similar plants had promptly died 
on his brick wall. Wondering why these bottle plants thrived, 
he concluded that it was for the following reasons : the air was 
free from soot; there was plenty of light; the glass kept the 
temperature even ; the moisture was constant ; and the air was 
quiet, yet the lid allowed some ventilation. “ Thus, then,” he 
says, ‘‘all the conditions necessary for the growth of my little 
plant were apparently fulfilled; and it remained only to put it to 
the test of an experiment. I placed the bottle outside of my study 
— a room facing the north — and to my great delight the plants 
continued to grow well . . . They required no attention, the same 
circulation of water continuing; and here they remained for nearly 
nearly four years ... At the end of this time they accidentally 
perished, during my absence from home, in consequence of the 
rusting of the lid, and the admission of rain water.”* 
Finding that his “ bottle ” fern grew so well, Dr. Ward experi- 
mented with many plants in cases of different sizes and became 
more and more enthusiastic over the possibilities of growing 
plants ‘‘in closely glazed cases.” Speaking of a fern, lovely, but 
exceedingly ‘‘ intractable under ordinary methods of cultivation,” 
he tells how ‘‘Baron Fischer, the superintendent of the botanical 
establishments of the Emperor of Russia, when he saw the plant 
growing in one of my cases, took off his hat, made a bow to it, 
and said : ‘ You have been my master all the days of my life.’ ” 
In one glass-enclosed case about 10 feet square, containing 
small palms and ferns, he kept an English robin for several 
months, and in another, on the top of his house, he grew alpine 
plants, which however, finally died from too much sunshine in 
the summer. He describes how he kept ferns and mosses alive 
‘‘ which had been planted nine years before in the bottle, after the 
first experimental plants had sprung up and perished ‘‘The soil 
is a mixture of peat mold, loam, and sand, with as much moisture 
as it would retain when water was poured through it. The same 
water has served for the nourishment of the plants up to the 
present time, nor am I able to assign any limit to their existence 
in this state.” 
Dr. Ward’s cases found a very practical use in transporting 
seeds and plants to and from foreign countries. In those days of 
slow sailing vessels, it was with great difficulty that living speci- 
mens were sent from one country to another, particularly when 
this involved crossing the equator from one hemisphere to another. 
Rare and delicate plants, often procured at great hazard, were 
apt to die on the voyage from cold, lack of water, or from the 
* Ward, N. H. On the growth of plants in closely glazed cases, pp. 26, 27, 
London. 1842. 95 pp. 
