Experience is a good but expensive school, and those that learn there are not apt to forget their lessons. One of my first lessons was in growing fuchsias for flowering. I took cuttings of blind shoots and they grew and grew and made splendid plants, but they attained quite a size before they did as well blooming. A little philosophy as to the trouble suggested using cuttings from old plants that we might say were on the point of flowering. The result was, the plants came in bloom eve n sooner than I had any idea of, and I had a fine lot of globular plants, about 10 inches high, full of bloom while yet in 2½-inch pots. It is the same way with Heliotropes and other plants. One season we propagated a lot of Chrysanthemums late, and in fall had plants about 6 inches high, covered with bloom, which astonished those who saw them, and thought they were dwarf till we explained. It is clear now. The length of time required, and the ease in getting plants to bloom, depend greatly on how far the disposition of the parent plant to bloom is developed.

If we take cuttings from a plant on which the bloom buds are already beginning to form, we can have them in bloom in the cutting bed; or, if we take them from a plant in which the disposition to bloom is not yet beginning to develop, or, a plant devoting its energies to growth instead of reproduction (flowering), we will have to wait for blooming some time - till that stage naturally arrives, or depend on unusually favorable circumstances.

1 have on some occasions had trouble in getting varieties of roses to bloom that ordinarily were very profuse, while others around them were blooming bountifully, and which other seasons had bloomed readily. The trouble was, no doubt, in the cuttings from which the plants came. Propagators do not generally discriminate between the bloom and blind shoot in selecting cuttings; besides, the blind shoot may offer such fine cuttings, and it is difficult for the propagator to resist the temptation; and some poor amateur or florist must pay the cost - perplexed to know the cause.

New Albany, Ind.

[A very long chapter in a treatise on the Theory of Horticulture, might be worked out from the articles that have appeared in the Gardeners' Monthly on this topic. The author of such a chapter might begin by reminding his reader that a plant was not an individual like an animal; but rather a collection of individuals, something like a city or a republic, and that these individuals had hereditary powers, like the individual in the animal world. We can cut these individuals from the community, plant the cuttings, and each will retain the characteristics it possessed when cut off, just as a seedling plant would do. He would prove this by what are known as sports. A branch of a rose exhibits some peculiarity. It is cut off and placed on its own roots, and then we have Sunsets, American Banner, Isabella Sprunt, and so on. Or, a branch of a peach may produce a i a nectarine. We take that branch, bud from it, and we have lots of nectarine trees. Bnefly we have the theory that any part of a plant has an hereditary character of its own, as well as the whole plant itself.

Now apply this to the case in point. Will plants from a barren shoot be as floriferous as plants from flowering ones? Theoretically we should say not. But it is rather a question for experience to settle. Mr. Walker's observations confirm this. Those of other observers do not seem to have done so.

But in all these discussions we must not forget that in nature there are numbers of operations going on at the same time in a plant, and which we must not forgetin formulating rules of practice. For instance : plants commence to flower only after vegetative vigor has been checked or exhausted. We need not take space to elaborate this here, as its accuracy as a general principle will be conceded. Now if we continually propagate from flowering wood, under hereditary law, we may expect more floriferous plants, but these plants will be of a lower grade of vitality, and more liable to disease, or to "run out." Plants from shoots of full vegetative vigor will be less floriferous, but will grow better, and when they do come into a flowering stage, may bloom more abundantly and last longer.

These are the theories philosophy would work out; but for all this a grain of actual experience will be worth a ton of theory. - Ed. G. M].