It is a well-known fact that grape culture in America got a fearful set back on account of degeneracy produced by long continued soft-wood propagation, and florists are now pursuing the same fatal course with the rose.

In the Old World the Hollyhock was also worked to death. As having a general bearing on this forcing kind of propagation, we reproduce from the Gardeners' Magazine what the editor says of the Hollyhock :

"The revival of this noble flower has been more rapid and general than we anticipated when we first directed attention to the facts. All that we have said about the injurious effects of the forcing system of propagation that was formerly adopted, and of the necessity for promoting healthy growth irrespective of all other considerations, whether of "improvement" or of haste in making stock, is justified by what we now see in the many places where the flower has obtained reasonable attention. Half-a-yard of learned nonsense about the anatomy of the fungus that has endeavoured to strangle it is, we think, crushed down to nothing by our advice to lovers of the hollyhock " to make it grow." The advice has been acted on, and the hollyhock has been saved. It was formerly the rule to kill the plant by grafting in a temperature of 8o°, and by raising seedlings and striking cuttings in a temperature of 700. Those practices have been abandoned, and the revival compels us to say, as we have said above of the recovery of the potato, that the disease that assailed it was in the nature of a punishment to man for his unjust treatment of one of Nature's choicest gifts".