COTTON CULTURE.

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ground ; indeed, while the lower branches of the cotton planthave ripe seeds the upper are bearing flowers. As the seedsripen, the husks expand, and the cotton fibre appears attachedto the seeds in the form of a round ball as large as an orange.As soon as the earliest husks are open, which is usually aboutthe last of July, picking commences. This operation is longcontinued, for a succession of pods ripen until the end ofNovember. As the cotton is gathered, it is dried and storedup till winter, when the separation of the fibre from the seedis effected.

The soil being so poor upon which the sea-island cottonis raised, the most of it is manured with a compost of cow-pen manure and vegetable stuff from the swamps. Guanohas also been applied to a considerable extent in raising cotton.I saw one field which must have been greatly benefited bya quantity of this substance, as the plants to which it hadbeen applied were nearly double the size of those that wereundressed. Guano, however, is more esteemed as a manurefor cotton on poor soils than on rich, for on the latter it isapt to send up too much wood.

In climates in which frosts do not occur, all the varietiesof cotton that are cultivated in the United States areperennial. But here the plants are always killed down bythe frosts, and the woody stems are now dead. The roots,however, were still fresh, and sending out some buds a littlebelow the surface of the ground. Jupiter assured me that asmall crop of cotton might be got from the same plants nextyear if they were allowed to stand, but as the quality of thefibre was also inferior, this practice was rarely followed.

Besides the cotton, about twenty acres of Indian cornand some pease were cultivated. The Indian com is plantedfrom the 1st March up to the 10th May, and the rotation onthe farm was—1st, cotton ; 2d, Indian corn ; 3d, cotton ; 4th,grasses and weeds for a series of years. There were 250acres which could be ploughed, so that less than a sixth ofthe improved land was under cotton. The peas were plantedin rows three feet apart; and sixteen peas are dropped intoholes at intervals of sixteen inches in the row. This planseems to be adopted in order to render the crop more easily