grower near New York has over 260,000 square feet of glass covering even in midwinter a gorgeous and fragrant jungle of orchids, palms, ferns, roses, carnations, violets, and mignonette. The outlay for glass alone is so serious that the Society of American Florists has contemplated putting up enough money to start a window glass factory of its own on co-operative principles, just as it insures its existing glass against hail.

Then there are the much dreaded insect enemies of the grower. First come the hexapods that prey upon the rosechewing, piercing, and sucking. Forces armed with dry or liquid arsenical compounds must be marshaled against these tiny pests with scientific precision. The coleoptera, too,-especially the rose chafer, must be fought with paris green or hellebore; and when the battle is at its height the persistent enemy pushes forward the green fly or aphis, which may give birth to six million individuals during her brief

fires and water from his boiler, and shut down indefinitely. But let the fires die down even for an hour in a five hundred foot glass house of delicate roses or carnations during cold weather, and the costly stock is forthwith killed.

Thus, whatever the price, fuel must be had. Distracted flower farmers have experimented with all sorts of substitutes for coal-wood, peat, charcoal, coke, sawdust, spent tanbark, wheat and rye, straw, crushed cane, corn cobs, and cotton stems. But they found it took four pounds of straw to do the work of one pound of coal, and to do it badly at that. Crude oil is really the best substitute; but nothing quite equals coal. One pound of it will evaporate seven pounds of water at two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit.

But in spite of trouble in the greenhouse the demand increases always. Today nine growers will annually send to New York five million roses; and round

about such cities as Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, and Washington are grown not less than thirtymillions of the queen of flowers, and far more than that number of carnations. The prod

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uct grown under glass, as well as that raised on tens of thousands of acres in the open air, is largely grown by specialists and handled by wholesalers and retailers, who are largely specialists also.

Great risks there are, as I have shown, but for the right man catering in the right way for this welcome demand of a prosperous nation, there is also great profit. Many a man buys a half-acre lot for

$500 or so near a city of say 40,000 people, and he builds three houses respectively for for roses, carnations and violets, each costing $1,000. These three flowers cannot be grown in one house, for each requires a special temperature and treatment. Add $1,000 for a home and $500 for general equipment and you have an investment of $5,000. Professor B. T. Galloway, of Washington, claims that at present prices the profit from the three houses for the first year should be: Gross, $3,000 to $3,500; net, $1,800 to $2,000. And when the entire half acre is covered there should be a net income of nearly $4,000-surely an amazing return for half an acre of suburban land!

Labor is not a great item. It works out all through the country at one man for every 1,500 square feet of glass; though some of the great rose-growing people do not use more than one man for each 10,000 feet. Carnation houses average about the same; but in the case of violets the work involved in clearing

the little plants and picking the delicate flowers calls for a far higher average of labor.

Much depends on a quick sale; but this, and the matter of picking and transport, has been reduced to a science, so that flowers now arrive in the city's heart in all their exquisite perfection. In Greater New York nearly thirty brokers are engaged in wholesaling cut flowers. on a common basis of fifteen per cent. And the largest concern handled one January day 82,889 roses, 167,995 carnations, 323,750 violets, and 23,100 lilies of the valley; besides larger lilies and lilac, mignonette and orchids, chiefly cattleyas and cyprepediums. Altogether $12,000 worth of cut flowers may change hands in a single day in America's greatest city; and taking one year with another New York's annual business is worth $2,500,000.

As to the floral decorations of today. while much less lavish than those of a decade ago, they are in far better taste.

A RIOT OF WILD FLORAL BEAUTIES.

The highest price ever paid for a wedding decoration in New York was $3,800; now one-third of this would be considered a high figure.

The grouping of magnificent palms is a feature of church weddings today, with graceful and stately Kentias and rich foliaged and tropical latania borbinica. Cut flowers with long stems are used, and both altar and chancel decked with masses of snow white blooms backed by lovely fronds of asparagus plu

mosus.

Bridegroom and bride, the latter with her lovely "shower" bouquet of snowy star-shaped pescatoria orchids, walk through a lovely and fragrant jungle of Kentia and palms, some of them worth $600 each; with fern masses, lilies, and caladiums; arches of

roses, too, and banks of violets and stephanotis. And the home is admirably decked for the happy occasion with smilax and orchids. A great staircase carries groups of palms with a brilliant background of potted azaleas and climbing roses.

As a rule the florist of today, a man of excellent taste and real love for flowers, is given a free hand, though his clients often evince strange tastes. A wealthy woman whose daughter was about to graduate at college came into an expensive florist's one day and spoke of a dainty bouquet as appropriate to the occasion. A very charming one was made up of roses, gardenias, tuberose, and lilies of the valley, but the price was $15. "My," was the startled comment, "I wouldn't like to pay that. I

thought of something about a dollar or even two; but I guess I'll have to make her some paper flowers instead."

The florist bowed. "It is a literary function, madam," he said, with grave sympathy, "and so perhaps paper flowers would be more suitable, after all."

More ambiguous and less courteous was the rejoinder of the florist to whom the friends of a deceased butcher came for a floral tribute. They suggested, with questionable taste, it should take the form of a cleaver! The artist in flowers, dismayed, protested strongly; his clients were firm, however.

"Well, well," cried the exasperated man at last, "there's no knowing what road your friend went, and perhaps after all a cleaver'll be the very thing he'll need at the end of it!"

T

HE newly-created Inland Waterways Commission is going to teach the people a lot of things about the most valuable mineral in the world—a mineral of which, because it is plentiful, we are more wasteful than of anything else, throwing it away wholesale, and exhibiting a stupid neglect of its possibilities of usefulness.

The mineral in question is water. Everybody drinks it, and most folks use it for bathing. The latter employment is considered by some non-essential, but as a beverage it is so far indispensable that, if wholly deprived of it, all of mankind on the earth-not to mention the fowls of the air and beasts of the fieldwould perish in about four days. The crops, too, are made to grow by the same beneficent fluid, which, incidentally, furnishes power on an enormous and steadily-increasing scale for manufacturing purposes. To the harnessing of their rivers the Southern States mainly owe their recent industrial rejuvenation.

The census of 1880 gave the number of horsepower produced by water for industrial purposes in this country as 1,225,000. But in those days it was necessary to locate a mill at the power site, whereas now it is put in the place most convenient for trade and transportation, and the water power, converted into electricity, is transmitted over copper wires. Thanks to which hange of method, there has been during the last ten years an annual increase of applied water power greater than the total above quoted for 1880.

Nevertheless-to show how much improvement remains to be made in this direction-it may be mentioned that at the present time there is going to waste, over dams built by the government to help navigation, 1,600,000 horsepower. This enormous amount of energy, readily available for manufacturing or other useful purposes, is absolutely thrown away; yet, if sold at a fair rental-say, twenty dollars annually per horsepower-it would maintain all of our inland waterways, keeping them dredged and in repair, and. in addition, would construct all of the new canals and other aqueous thorough

fares that we may require in the future. with no expense to the taxpayers.

This is only one example of the gigantic waste due to our ignorance and carelessness in the use of the fluid. Even now the Water Resources branch of the United States Geological Survey is preparing a statement of the amount of power that is going to waste in the Mississippi basin. It is not yet completed, but the preliminary and approximate estimate is 3,300,000 horsepower. Just think what that signifies! At a rental of twenty dollars a year per horsepower, it means a literal throwing away of $66,000,000 in good money every twelvemonth.

Inasmuch as most people do not know what a horsepower is, it may be as well to explain that it is the amount of energy produced by one cubic foot of water per second falling nine feet. The total energy represented by the Mississippi River, as it flows from Cairo, at the mouth of the Ohio, to the Gulf, is 13,000,000 horsepower. But the great stream, of course, cannot be utilized for industrial purposes, because the slope

over which it passes is too gradual. A mighty dam might be built at its lower end, so as to get all of its fall in one descent, thus making its power economically available; but such an expedient obviously would be out of the question, inasmuch as it would transform the Mississippi Valley into a vast lake covering thousands of square miles of what is now dry land.

Now, one result of our failure to control properly our water supply is the curse of floods. It will be news to most people that the damage done by floods in the United States far exceeds $100,000,000 per annum! Think of the wiping out of that much of the product of human industry every year by unexpected oversupplies of the most indispensable of all necessaries! Consider, too, that the bulk of this loss is wholly needless, inasmuch as it could easily be prevented.

Take, for instance, the case of the Ohio river floods of last winter. They caused personal losses of at least $100,000,000without reckoning incidental depreciation in the value of a great deal of real estate.