gjjtiraltutal antt toitmitit $toiaraj; 



INCLUDING 



HORTICULTURE, ARBORICULTURE, THE CULTURE AND PRESERVATION OF SEEDS AND FRUITS, 



THE INTRODUCTION AND PREPARATION OF VEGETABLE TEXTILE FIBRES J 



OBSERVATIONS ON DISEASES OF PLANTS, ETC. 



The Cotton-Plant and its Varieties in the United States. 



E present to the readers of the Agricultural Year-Book for 

 1855-6, a series of the most beautiful and accurate engrav- 

 ings ever published, illustrative of the growth and diseases 

 of the great staple of American agricultural industry — Cot- 

 ton. These engravings (which are also interesting from 

 the fact that they are specimens of the new and beautiful 

 process of Chromo-Lithography) were designed by Prof. B. 

 C. L. Wailes, Geologist of the State of Mississippi, and first 

 published during the past year by the authority of the Legis- 

 lature, in the Geological Report of Mississippi. 



Of the many varieties of the Cotton-plant known to 

 naturalists, the annual herbaceous kinds are alone cul- 

 tivated in the United States. The average height of the plant, in land of medium quality, 

 is about five feet ; in very fertile soil it attains to double that height, while in an exhausted 

 and sterile soil it becomes quite a dwarf. Its appearance somewhat resembles that of the 

 okra-plant, but is much more branched, and the leaves less in size and of more uniform 

 shape. The branches are long and jointed, occasionally bifurcated, and bearing at each 

 joint a boll or capsule containing the wool and seed. Each boll is accompanied by a broad 

 indented leaf, springing from the same joint of the branch and resting upon a footstalk three 

 or four inches in length. The woody fibre of the plant is white, spongy, and brittle, but is 

 invested with a thick brown epidermis, which is very pliable and tenacious. The root is tuber- 

 ous, penetrating deeply into the subsoil, and is thus less affected by drought than most 

 other plants. The blossom is cup-shaped, two or three inches in length, never very widely 

 expanded; white in the first day until past noon, then changing gradually to a red — closing 

 slowly for the next day or two, with a twist at the extremity over the germ of the young boll, 

 by which it is speedily detached in its rapid growth, when it withers and is cast off, leaving 

 the boll invested by a capacious, tripartite, dentate calyx, sufficiently large to enclose it until 

 half grown. 



The calyx containing the germ of the flower is of a triangular shape, and is technically known 

 as the square or form. In this stage of growth these are liable to be disjointed and fall, from 

 the long prevalence of drought, but more so when a rainy season suddenly succeeds, occasion- 

 ing a second growth from the rapid elaboration of sap, which in its circulation seems not to 

 enter into the footstalk as freely as into other parts of the plant. 



The flower of the Sea-Island cotton is in its first stages of a bright sulphur color, the boll 

 small, trilobate, and more elongated, while the other varieties produce bolls of a larger size, 

 which open or divide into four, and occasionally into five, valves or cells. The cotton-plant 

 commences flowering about the 1st of June, and ceases about the 1st of November, when the 

 Dlant is killed by the frost. The bolls are egg-shaped, rather under the size of the egg of the 



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