rnsey or
in England. Applying industry to agriculture, these last make their
climate in addition to their soil, by means of the greenhouse.

Fifty years ago the greenhouse was the luxury of the rich. It was kept
to grow exotic plants for pleasure. But nowadays its use begins to be
generalized. A tremendous industry has grown up lately in Guernsey and
Jersey, where hundreds of acres are already covered with glass--to say
nothing of the countless small greenhouses kept in every little farm
garden. Acres and acres of greenhouses have lately been built also at
Worthing (103 acres in 1912), in the suburbs of London, and in several
other parts of England and Scotland.

They are built of all qualities, beginning with those which have granite
walls, down to those which represent mere shelters made in planks and
glass frames, which cost, even now, with all the tribute paid to
capitalists and middlemen, less than 3s. 6d. per square yard under
glass. Most of them are heated for at least three of four months every
year; but even the cool greenhouses, which are not heated at all, give
excellent results--of course, not for growing grapes and tropical
plants, but for potatoes, carrots, peas, tomatoes, and so on.

In this way man emancipates himself from climate, and at the same time
he avoids also the heavy work with the hot-beds, and he saves both in
buying much less manure and in work. Three men to the acre, each of them
working less than sixty hours a week, produce on very small spaces what
formerly required acres and acres of land.

The result of all these recent conquests of culture is, that if one-half
only of the adults of a city gave each about fifty half-days for the
culture of the finest fruit and vegetables _out of season_, they would
have all the year round an unlimited supply of that sort of fruit and
vegetables for the whole population.

But there is a still more important fact to notice. The greenhouse has
nowadays a tendency to become a mere _kitchen garden under glass_. And
when it is used to such a purpose, the simplest plank-and-glass unheated
shelters already give fabulous crops--such as, for instance, 500 bushels
of potatoes per acre as a first crop, ready by the end of April; after
which a second and a third crop are obtained in the extremely high
temperature which prevails in the summer under glass.

I gave in my "Fields, Factories, and Workshops," most striking facts in
this direction. Sufficient to say h