British Association for the Advancement of Science. 277 
There are few other manufacturing products of any value, and these 
are not produced in the Company’s territories, with one or two 
slight exceptions. The transit duties on the conveyance of goods 
are exceedingly. onerous, and form a great impediment to commerce. 
Statistics of trade between the United Kingdom and the United 
States of America.—The British colonies which now form part of 
the United States of America, were, with the exception of Georgia, 
all founded in the seventeenth century. The date of the first set- 
tlement of each individual colony was as follows :— 
Virginia - - 1607 Maryland - . 1633 
New York-  - 1614 Connecticut - 1635 
Massachusetts - 1620 Rhode Island - 1636 
New Hampshire - 1623 North Carolina - 1650 
New Jersey - 1624 South Carolina - 1670 
Delaware - - 1627 Pennsylvania = - 1682 
Maine - - 1630 Georgia - . 1733 
It was not until more than a century had elapsed from the period 
referred to in the foregoing extract, and when they had secured their 
independence, that any part of the raw material employed in the 
cotton manufacture was received from the British plantations in 
America. A few bags of cotton, which arrived in 1785 and 1786, 
were apparently of foreign growth, and had been transmitted to 
America from the Spanish main. Cotton was raised in gardens in 
the United States before 1786; but that was the first year in which 
it was cultivated by planters as a crop, and 1787 was the earliest 
year in which any of the growth of the country was exported. 
Before the separation of the British provinces from the mother 
country, the statements which were given concerning their trade 
exhibited that of each province separately, Attention was then di- 
rected to a table which contained the official value of imports and 
exports from and to each province, for the years 1701, 1710, 1720, 
1730, 1740, 1750, and 1760, and thereafter for each individual 
year to 1783, when the independence of the United States was 
fully recognized. For a long period up to that event the operation 
of the navigation laws had given to this country a monopoly of the 
trade with its colonies; and Mr. Porter considered it worthy of re- 
mark, that so long as the American provinces continued thus con- 
nected with England, the increase of the commercial intercourse 
bore a very inadequate proportion to their increasing population. In 
Vor. XXXIUI.—No. 2. 36 
