I have carefully read and studied every article contributed to your valuable journal in favor and against steam heating but have not found in one article anything that compares with the heating of E. Hippard's establishment in Youngstown, Ohio. Of this establishment I am foreman and can truthfully testify to the merits of steam.

For the benefit of your numerous readers I deem it my duty as a florist to learn and teach all I know. The above named place is one of the best built and arranged commercial greenhouse establishments I have ever seen, covering upwards of 12,000 square feet of glass. The boiler used to heat this amount of glass and work-shop, also a dwelling house of thirteen rooms and large hall (every room is heated), is a small 15-horse power locomotive style Taft boiler; the piping consists of over four thousand lineal feet of two-inch gas pipe and nine large radiators, costing for the past very cold winter only a trifle over $90. The attention required for firing was not much. In the coldest weather when the mercury would go to 180 and 200 below zero I would not lose two hours' sleep in such a night. The pressure was never over five pounds of steam, and in ordinary weather from one to two pounds were plenty.

The boiler is set eight feet below the surface of greenhouse floors, and so arranged as to cause all condensed steam to run back to boiler without a steam trap, only by grading the pipe to a continuous degree of two to four inches in one hundred lineal feet. The boiler needs water about every six or ten days, and certainly could never fall so low as to cause any danger by burning crown sheets or flues. By a novel and very useful invention gotten up by Mr. Hippard I can without any fear of oversleeping myself lay down and sleep with perfect confidence; the arrangement is so constructed as to call by a bell when the heat goes down or up to a certain degree we set it.

Youngstown, Ohio.