48 
JOURNAL  OF  HORTICULTURE  AND  COTTAGE  GARDENER. 
January  21,  1897. 
Water,  as  before  stated,  is  a  compound — i  e.,  it  consists  of  two 
elements.  The  chemist  uses  a  kind  of  shorthand  to  express  the 
different  elements  and  compounds.  Water  is  expressed  as  H20. 
We  have  seen  that  H  =  hydrogen  and  O  =  oxygen,  and  as  we  have 
water  expressed  as  H20,  it  signifies  to  us  that  this  substance  (water) 
is  composed  of  two  parts  by  volume  of  hydrogen  chemically  united 
with  one  part  by  volume  of  oxygen.  But  I  have  previously 
stated  that  “  oxygen  constituted  eight-ninths  by  weight  of  water,” 
there  is  evidently  some  difference  then  between  the  volume  of 
these  two  substances  and  their  respective  weights. 
Hydrogen  is  the  lightest  substance  known,  and  is  used  in 
chemistry  as  the  unit  of  weight.  If  we  take  equal  volumes  of 
hydrogen  and  oxygen  gases  and  weigh  them,  we  should  find  that 
the  latter  would  weigh  nearly  sixteen  times  heavier  than  the 
former.  As  water  consists  of  two  parts  by  volume  of  hydrogen 
and  one  part  by  volume  of  oxygen,  it  must  necessarily  follow 
that  water  contains  two  parts  by  weight  of  hydrogen  and  sixteen 
parts  by  weight  of  oxygen.  The  weights  of  the  elements  always 
remain  constant,  so  whatever  quantity  of  water  is  taken  the  pro¬ 
portion  of  hydrogen  to  oxygen  will  be  as  two  to  sixteen  or,  what  is 
the  same  thing,  one  to  eight.  There  are  many  more  interesting 
facts  about  water  which  we  shall  have  to  consider,  but  it  will  be 
better  to  leave  them  until  we  have  finished  with  the  elements. — W.D. 
(To  be  continued/} 
PRECEPT  AND  PRACTICE. 
( Continued  from  page  24.) 
More  tuning  of  pipes  ?  Patienee,  I  prithee,  young  friend. 
Allow  me  to  explain  that  our  harmony  must  commence  low  down 
on  the  scale,  and  I  would  not  thereby  have  you  feel  aggrieved  at 
any  apparent  slight  upon  your  intelligence.  Any  thoughts,  precepts, 
or  practice  must  now,  at  the  start,  catch  the  ear  of  the  youngest  of 
young  brothers  of  the  craft,  for  “  as  the  twig  is  bent  the  tree's 
inclined.”  There  is,  too,  a  great  deal  of  inclination  in  the  “  twigs,” 
which  a  little  observation  will  reveal.  To  illustrate  this  by  a  case 
in  point.  Last  summer  in  a  certain  garden  I  was  much  amused  to  see 
a  barrow  piled  high  with  weeds  and  rubbish,  veritably  zigzagging 
towards  me,  down  one  of  the  walks,  the  motive  power  being 
invisible  until  the  near  approach  revealed  young  knickerbockers 
struggling  manfully  with  the  crowning  glory  of  his  hard  hour’s 
work.  This  boy,  possessed  of  rare  pluck,  whose  age  does  not 
exceed  a  dozen  summers,  in  his  unflagging  z  al  borne  through  the 
burden  and  heat  of  the  long  days,  is  typical  of  a  sound 
embryo  gardener  ;  and  this  one  is  typical  in  all  points  of  the 
British  boy  in  his  love  of  fighting,  of  sour  Apples  and  similar 
luxuries.  So  much  did  the  former  predominate  that  a  bad  shot  at 
another  boy’s  head,  which  missed  its  mark  to  the  detriment  of  some 
glass,  has  relegated  him,  much  to  his  chagrin,  to  a  winter’s  schooling, 
but  his  one  desire  is  to  be  baek  in  the  garden,  and  he  won’t  be 
happy  till  he  gets  it.  With  even  the  toil  and  drudgery  part  of 
garden  work  his  heart,  which  is  figuratively  as  big  as  his  body, 
is  in  it.  Lessons  he  hates  with  all  the  fervent  hatred  of  a  healthy 
young  animal,  and  will  continue  to  do  so  until  their  importance 
dawns  upon  his  expanding  mind,  when,  prompted  by  sound  teaching 
and  encouraged  by  good  example,  there  is  good  reason  for  supposing 
that  young  knickerbockers  now  struggling  under  a  load  of  weeds 
may  eventually  be  fitted  to  bear  the  higher  honours  of  a  gardener’s 
vocation. 
Ambition,  too,  does  not  disdain  knickerbockers,  for  I  know 
that  young  B.  looks  on  the  bothy  as  a  kind  of  earthly  paradise  ; 
and  as  for  the  glass  department,  why  he  peers  through  the  panes 
with  longing  eyes  when  the  lads  are  syringing,  for  it  must  be — it 
is — some  kind  of  angel’s  work.  Now,  I  am  quite  sure  that  some  of 
our  clever  contributors  to  “  The  Young  Gardener’s  Domain”  will 
be  a  little  disgusted  at  the  apparent  puerility  of  this  beginning  ; 
yet  it  is  not  so  apparent  to  me,  who  could  have  gone  farther 
back,  in  order  to  bring  forward  earlier  aspirations  marking  the 
preliminary  footsteps  of  a  successful  gardener.  The  boy  who 
cheerfully  turns  the  real  drudgery  into  pleasure  is  not  on6  to  be 
burdened  with  many  grievances  later  in  life. 
Probably  a  little  careful  selection  at  this  early  stage  would 
lesult  in  weeding  out  some,  at  least,  who  eventually  prove  to  be 
detrimental.  There  cannot  be  any  severer  test  of  a  boy’s  fitness 
for  gardening  than  his  tractability  to  perform  his  allotted  task 
unspurred.  A  labourer  once  handed  over  his  little  son  to  my 
charge,  with  the  proviso  that  I  might  pull  the  boy’s  ears  as  often 
as  I  liked,  and  as  long  as  I  liked.  “Pull  ’em  well,  and  he’ll  work 
well.”  Fortunately  the  boy  did  exceedingly  well  without,  for  I 
would  be  no  party  to  such  a  bargain.  I  saw  quite  sufficient  of 
that  in  one  garden,  where  the  ear-pulling  was  of  almost  daily 
occurrence,  and  the  howls  of  the  victims  are  borne  on  the  breeze 
of  memory,  to  conclude  that  when  it  is  necessary  to  resort  to 
stimulants  of  that  kind  those  boys  are  not  born  for  gardeners,  and 
that  their  object  in  life  is  for  some  other  field,  to  which  the  sooner 
they  are  relegated  the  better  for  all  concerned. 
One  intelligent  boy  for  whom  I  went  to  some  trouble  in  order 
to  give  him  a  start  in  the  bothy,  for  which  the  parents  expressed 
considerably  more  anxiety  than  the  boy  himself  did  regarding 
it,  anil  rightly  so,  of  course,  as  the  introduction  to  a  life  of 
respectability,  grievously  disappointed  me,  for  one  fine  day  he 
marched  away,  discarding  the  blue  apron  to  don  the  red  jacket. 
Now  if  there  are  any  boys  filled  with  military  or  naval  notions,  or, 
indeed,  any  notions  foreign  to  gardening,  they  have  no  right  of  entry 
into  it,  and  any  moral  force  of  teaching  or  example,  or  physical 
force  such  as  ear-pulling  to  subdue  their  chafing  spirits,  is 
simply  a  mistake.  It  is  an  intuitive  love  from  which  springs  that 
“  yearning  ambition  ”  my  esteemed  helper  spoke  of,  that  intuitive 
love  of  a  garden  and  gardening  which  is  able  to  satisfy  the  restless 
spirit  of  a  boy  and  reconcile  him  to  labour. 
Of  half  a  dozen  boys  who  seek  admission  into  a  garden,  or 
for  whom  admission  is  sought  by  their  friends,  possibly  not  more 
than  one  is  worthy  of  being  retained  in  it,  but  the  one  who  is 
should  have  all  the  encouragement  we  can  give  him  by  affording 
him,  as  far  as  possible,  variety  in  his  work,  and  by  letting  him 
see  that  neither  it  nor  he  are  beneath  our  notice.  It  is  very 
crushing  to  these  little  men  to  be  regarded  as  mere  machines. 
There  is,  doubtless,  a  great  responsibility  attached  to  the  hatching 
out  of  embryo  gardeners,  and  those  who  feel  that  it  is  so  will  not 
lightly  undertake  the  task. 
Many  kindly  memories  crop  up  of  my  treatment  as  a  boy,  and 
some  that  are  not  so,  it  is  needless  to  say.  The  latter,  chiefly  of 
treatment  from  subordinates,  to  whose  tender  mercies  the  juveniles 
are  too  often  submitted,  shouting  “  boy  ”  hare  and  “  boy  ”  there  ; 
sending  him  for  surreptitious  cans  of  beer  to  refresh  their  thirsty 
cravings,  and  other  disagreeable  details  too  numerous  to  mention. 
How  different  was  it  at  one  place  where  our  master,  in  his  multi¬ 
farious  duties,  always  found  time  for  a  passing  glance  at  the  boy 
and  his  work,  setting  little  crooked  matters  straight ;  not  only 
showing  how  certain  things  were  to  be  done,  but  explaining  why 
they  should  or  should  not  be  thus  done.  How  nice,  too  (apologies 
to  Mrs.  Scribe),  to  be  addressed  by  one’s  name  (most  boys  have 
one),  and  with  what  zest  under  these  conditions  the  task  was  per¬ 
formed,  and  what  a  splendid  thing  it  was  to  be  a  boy  in  that 
garden  !  This  was,  of  course,  the  pre-bothyite  period.  To  proceed 
farther  under  this  head  would  probably  lead  to  the  inference  that 
“An  Old  Boy”  was  rapidly  drifting  lrom  first  into  second  child¬ 
hood.  Sufficient  has  been  advanced,  I  trust,  to  point  a  moral 
generally,  particularly  that  conclusion  I  have  long  since 
arrived  at — viz.,  that  a  little  observation  of  “  that  boy  ”  will, 
respecting  his  future  as  a  gardener,  easily  solve  the  question  now, 
“  To  be,  or  not  to  be.” — An  Old  Boy. 
(To  b-i  continued.) 
BEGONIA  GLOIRE  DE  LORRAINE. 
Perhaps  on  no  class  of  plants  has  the  art  of  the  hybridist  been 
brought  to  bear  with  greater  force  than  on  the  Begonia,  the  result  being 
that  we  have  now  variety  sufficient  to  meet  the  requirements  of  the 
most  fastidious.  Amongst  those  kinds  which  are  popular  on  account  of 
their  winter-blooming  propensities,  the  one  named  at  the  head  of  this 
note  may  be  well  placed  as  one  of  the  best.  Being,  comparatively 
speaking,  new,  this  variety  has  not  yet  found  its  way  into  a  large 
number  of  private  gardens,  but  as  it  becomes  more  widely  known  and 
distributed  there  is  no  reason  to  think  that  it  will  not  be  grown  and 
appreciated  in  most  establishments. 
Floriferousness  is  one  of  the  chief  qualifications  of  Gloire  de  Lorraine 
(fig.  15),  and  as  it  produces  its  charming  rosy  pink  blossoms  profusely 
right  through  the  dullest  time  of  the  year,  this  adds  greater  weight  to  its 
value.  The  habit  of  the  plant  is  pendulous  and  graceful,  and  when 
grown  in  shallow  pans  suspended  from  the  roof  of  a  greenhouse  it  is 
seen  to  the  best  advantage.  As  a  plant  for  room  decoration  it  may  be 
strongly  recommended,  as  the  delicate  tint  of  the  flowers  is  particularly 
attractive  under  artificial  light.  The  foliage  is  elegant  without  being 
unduly  robust,  but  it  is  in  the  graceful  habit  and  the  abundant  produc¬ 
tion  of  bloom  that  the  usefulness  of  the  variety  mainly  lies. 
To  keep  up  a  constant  supply  of  flowers  through  the  winter  months 
is  a  cause  of  anxiety  to  many  gardeners  ;  but  by  growing  a  quantity  of 
this  useful  Begonia  the  anxiety  may  to  some  extent  be  lessened,  as  it  is 
easily  propagated  and  grown,  well  adapted  for  decorative  purposes,  and 
requires  no  more  elaborate  accommodation  than  that  afforded  in  the 
ordinary  greenhouse. — Grower. 
