, and made of the finest
material down to the commonest wood, were made so a circulation of hot
water was kept up over as large an area as the necessity of the owner
might require.

The results seemed excellent, but lo, every now and again, disastrous
failures would occur. A material would spread all around called by the
florist the cutting bench fungus, that would sweep through his crop like
a plague; all sorts of theories would be given, and numberless articles
appear in the horticultural periodicals of the day on its cause and
cure. Presently it was found that those who did not use a tank of water,
but had inclosed a space to be heated by hot water pipes, did not seem
to suffer so much from the invidious foe. Much moisture was found an
excellent remedy for the enemy, though it might have been its first
cause, as it could be best warded off by dousing with the once praised
hot water tank.

Whether a house is used exclusively or not, the ordinary hot water pipes
are simply inclosed in a brick or wood space, with ventilators that may
be opened to let off part of the confined heat into the house at
pleasure. The front benches used are about two feet six inches to three
feet in width, over, say four 4-inch pipes, up to within eighteen inches
or two feet of the glass. On this is a platform over which three to six
inches of sand is put, and in this bed are placed the cuttings where,
with the differences before mentioned, they are kept as uniform as
possible, and the sand kept decidedly wet. Almost everything we called
soft wooded, or that can be got from the soft wood, even including most
of our hardy shrubs, can be rooted with almost unerring certainty in the
larger establishments by the hundreds of thousands.

As modern ideas demand large propagating, even in the summer, when it is
next to impossible to keep these proportions of top and bottom heat, if
in an ordinary propagating house, such firms as Miller & Hunt, strike
out with another idea to overcome the difficulty. This is none other
than instead of glass, they have a muslin canvas-covered house, in which
they have again pits, where mild bottom heat can be obtained by the use
of spent hops, tan bark, manure, or other material. Of course, it would
be idle to talk of a summer bottom heat of 60 deg., but instead of that,
they get one of about 80 deg., and depend upon a close, uniform, high,
moist temperature to carry out the same results.

With this, rose plants can