There was also a great variety of fruit and flowers upon the table, and seeds of several useful vegetables were distributed.
July 3rd.
Seven medals were awarded to different individuals for fruit sent by them to the Society’s fête on the 23rd of June; and one to Capt. Drummond, for his “successful exertions in bringing living plants of the mangosteen from the East Indies.” A paper by the president was read upon an improvement in the mode of constructing hotbeds, but we despair of explaining it successfully without reference to figures. Among the display of fruits and flowers, which were exceedingly numerous, we were particularly struck by a collection of twenty-two varieties of strawberries from the Society’s garden.
Upon this occasion, thirty-nine new members were either ballotted for, or proposed, a striking proof of the estimation in which the Society is held by the public.
July 17th.
Upon this occasion, an enormous pine-cone from the River Columbia was exhibited. It measured 1612 inches in length, and was stated to have been procured by the Society’s collector, Mr. David Douglas. Its seeds were represented to be as large as those of the stone-pine, and eatable. The tree is of the family of Pinus strobus, [p192] and will be an invaluable acquisition to our forests, if it should prove to succeed as well in this climate as in its own. We have already given some account of this plant in the last number of the old series of this Journal. The usual display was made of the finest fruit and flowers of the season.
August 7th.
A complete coloured set of the costly Flora danica was placed upon the table, having been presented by His Majesty the King of Denmark. An improved apparatus for fumigating hothouses was exhibited by its inventor, Mr. John Read: it consists of a brass cylinder, attached to the orifice of a pair of bellows, and fitted up with a chimney and draft-hole closed by a valve. The tobacco is put into the cylinder and ignited, and the blast from the bellows expels the smoke. The contrivance is ingenious enough, but while a hot-house fifty feet long, may be filled with smoke in ten minutes by means of a flower-pot, with a hole in its bottom, and a common pair of bellows, we cannot recommend any more expensive, and certainly less efficient apparatus.
The table was covered with a profusion of fruits and flowers.