_Insects._ After, as usual, many fruitless attempts, he at last discovered the following method: “Take horse-dung from the stable, the fresher the better, sufficient to make a hot-bed three feet high, to receive a melon frame three feet deep at the back; put on the frame and lights immediately, and cover the whole with mats to bring up the heat. When the bed is at the strongest heat, take some faggots, open them, and spread the sticks over the surface of the bed on the dung, so as to keep the plants from being scorched; set the plants or suckers bottom uppermost on the sticks; shut down your lights quite close, and cover them over well with double mats, to keep in the steam. Let the plants remain in this state one hour, then take out the plants and wash them in cold water previously brought to the side of your bed, set them in a dry place with their tops downwards to drain, and afterwards plant them. This treatment is sure to kill every insect. You will observe likewise, that if your suckers are kept in the frames all the winter, stuck in the tan without soil or fire, the effluvia from the linings are sure to kill all the bugs.” _Culture of the Ananas_, p. 33. _Fruit Produced._ The general crop is produced in the usual season, viz. from June to September, or October; but some are produced every month in the year. The large sorts, as the New Providence, &c. require three years to bring them to perfection, but the Old Queen, and Ripley’s New Queen, may be brought to perfection in three months; though from the circumstances requisite to render this practicable, viz. plants fruiting in February, or the beginning of March, it must be considered more a matter of accident or curiosity than of any real advantage. It is evident, at all events, that it can never become general; for certainly no gardener would desire all his plants to come into fruit in February or March. Mr. Baldwin grows his fruit to a very considerable size even when produced in so short a period. “At a meeting of the Horticultural Society of London, held in October, 1817, T. Baldwin, gardener to the Marquis of Hertford, at Ragley, presented a Queen Pine of great beauty and superior flavor. It measured sixteen inches in circumference, seven inches in length, and weighed four pounds. The plant on which it was produced was little more than fifteen months old.” _Hort. Tr._ vol. iii. p. 118.