between 70° and 95°, with a wish to make the plants show fruit and blossom in the present month (October.) In this, I have in part succeeded, though many of my plants have flowered a fortnight or three weeks sooner than I wished. The fruit is swelling well, and, I believe, will receive sufficient light through the winter to enable it to ripen in much perfection. The excellence of a few Pine Apples, which ripened in this house in the last winter, leads me almost to doubt, whether the fruit in it will not ripen better, early in the spring, than in the middle of the summer, for I have observed that this species of plant, though extremely patient of high temperature, is not, by any means, so patient of the action of very continued bright light, as many other plants: and much less so than the Fig and Orange tree: possibly, having been formed by nature for inter-tropical climates, its powers of life may become fatigued, and exhausted by the length of a bright English summer’s day in high temperature. Being a plant of low stature, nature has also probably given it the power to ripen its fruit and seed, in the shade of other plants, in its native climate; and I discovered in the last summer, that it possesses the power to ripen its fruit perfectly in a lower temperature than I previously thought it capable of growing in. “In the month of June, I gave a couple of Pine plants, which had shown fruit at six months old, and were of small size, and no value, to a child of one of my friends, to be placed in a conservatory, in which no fires were kept during the summer. In July, a storm of hail destroyed nearly, or fully, half the glass of the conservatory; and its temperature, through the summer and autumn, had been so low, that the Chasselas grapes in it were not ripe in the second week in September. In the second week of the present month (October) one of the Pine Apples became ripe, having previously swollen to a most extraordinary size, comparatively with the size of the plant; and upon measuring accurately the comparative width of the fruit, and of the stem, I found the width of the fruit to exceed that of the stem in the proportion of seven and three-quarters to one. The fruit had, of course, been propped during all the latter part of the summer, the stem being wholly incapable of supporting it. The taste and flavour of this fruit were excellent, and the appearance of the other, which is not yet ripe, and is of a larger size, is still more promising. I purpose to profit by this result in the next summer; and I hope to be able to communicate some further information to the Society in the autumn. I feel perfectly confident, that if the roots of these plants had grown in a hot-bed of any kind, their sap would have been impelled into other channels; and that their fruit would not have attained, in any degree, the state of perfection which I have described.”