AGEICULTURAL PEODUCTS OF THE UNITED STATES. 73 



of nearly $51,000,000, nearly 2,000,000 bushels of clover-seed, 

 1,300,000 bushels of other grass seed, 5,025 tons of hemp, 1,565,- 

 000 pounds of flax, and 7,000,000 bushels of flax-seed. These 

 vegetable growths were familiar to ancient European agriculture, 

 but they were all introduced into North America after the close 

 of the sixteenth centmy. 



Of the fruits of agricultural industry unknown to the Greeks 

 and Romans, or too httle employed by them to be of commercial 

 importance, the United States produced, in 18T9, 110,000,000 

 pounds of rice, nearly 12,000,000 bushels of buckwheat, 5,700,- 

 000 bales of cotton,* 178,000 hogsheads of cane sugar, 16,500,- 

 000 gallons of cane molasses, 28,000,000 gallons of sorghum mo- 

 lasses, all yielded by vegetables introduced into that country 

 within two hundred years, and — ^with the exception of buck- 

 wheat, the origin of which is uncertain, and of cotton — all, di- 

 rectly or indirectly, from the East Indies ; besides, from indige- 

 nous plants unknown to ancient agriculture, 1,754,590,000 bushels 

 of Indian corn, 472,600,000 pounds of tobacco, about 170,000,000 

 bushels of the common potato, 33,000,000 bushels of sweet pota- 

 toes, 36,500,000 pounds of maple sugar, and 1,800,000 gallons of 

 maple molasses.f To all this we are to add 35,000,000 tons of 

 hay, — ^produced partly by new, partly by long known, partly by 



* Cotton, though cultivated in Asia from the remotest antiquity, and known 

 as a rare and costly product to the Latins and the Greeks, was not used by 

 them except as an article of luxury, nor did it enter into their commerce to 

 any considerable extent as a regular object of importation. The early voyag- 

 ers found it in common use in the West Indies and in the provinces first colo- 

 Dized by the Spaniards ; but it was introduced into the territorj^ of the United 

 States by European settlers, and did not become of any importance until after 

 the Revolution. Cotton-seed was sown in Virginia as early as 1621, but was 

 not cultivated with a view to profit for more than a century afterwards. Sea- 

 island cotton was first grown on the coast of Georgia in 1786, the seed having 

 been brought from the Bahamas, where it had been introduced from A nguilla. 

 — BiGELOW, Les Etats- Unis en 1863, p. 370. 



f There was a falling off between 1860 and 1870 of 11,000,000 pounds in the 

 quantity of maple sugar, and of more than 1,000,000 gallons of maple molasses, 

 the amount in 1870 being, of sugar, 28,000,000 pounds ; of molasses, 925,000 

 gallons. The high price of cane sugar during and after the civil war must have 

 tended to stimulate the production of maple sugar and molasses, but the do- 

 mestic warfare on the woods more than compensated this cause of increase. 

 The above statistics for 1880, however, show that these products have now 

 nearly reached their former high figure. 

 4 



