Harvard's Garden Of Glass

The botanical department of the college has been receiving during the year a very valuable collection of glass flowers. They are made by a secret process by a firm named Blatchka, consisting of father and son, in Dresden, Germany. The flowers are of exquisite workmanship, and cannot be distinguished by the eye from the real ones. These flowers are the only ones of the kind ever made, and the firm has agreed not to manufacture for any institution but Harvard College. Three or four hundred specimens have now been received. The collection when complete will illustrate all the families of plants in North America, all economic plants, and the more important of the lower plants, including enlarged parts and sections of the finer details of plants for study. Mrs. Ware, of Boston, is the donor of this valuable addition to the facilities of the university. - N. Y. Tribune.

Heading Cauliflower

There is no trouble at all in heading cauliflower set in frames in autumn. We plant six plants to each sash and fill in with Boston Market lettuce. The lettuce is headed and cut during the winter, and by the time the cauliflower plants crowd against the glass, if they have been properly hardened by airing, the sashes can be stripped off and used on other frames for hardening off tomato plants. Some years ago I had 1,000 sashes in Virginia used in this way, which made the most remarkable crop of cauliflower I ever saw; 6,000 plants of Snowball cauliflower made 6,000 marketable heads, a result I never had before nor since. - W. F. Massey, N. C. Experiment Station.

Heading Of Cauliflowers

A gardener of long experience warrants cauliflowers to make fine heads if you winter small plants, say of three or four leaves, in a cold-frame. I have not tried the experiment, but knowing the man who makes the statement, I purpose to do so. Another friend claims that the failure in cauliflower in the home garden comes from poor seeds, that are produced on the lateral shoots. - S. B. D.

Heating Of The Green Houses

The circulation of hot water for the heating of baths was known to the Romans, who only employed bronze pipes, which one still sees in the passages of the ruins of their thermae. Many centuries later, in 1675, Evelyn speaks of heating greenhouses in England by a circulation of hot air; then in 1706, Triewald heated a green-house by a heater placed outside, but having hot water circulating through pipes, under the plants.

In France, Bonnemain was the first who, in 1777, applied the circulation of hot water to an apparatus made for artificial incubation. Later he applied his system to the heating of baths and greenhouses; he does not seem to have derived much profit from his works, for on the 21st of May, 1828, Mr. Payen submits a report to the Society of Encouragement, in which he mentions the em harassing circumstances of Bonnemain, and enumerates bis claims to recognition by his compatriots.

[to be concluded next month].