THE COAST REGION. 25 



be adapted to them, they might become an important staple of export. 

 Every variety of garden produce does well, as witness the extensive truck 

 gardens on Charleston Neck, which furnish large supplies of fruits and 

 vegetables of the finest quality to distant markets. The wild grapes, 

 which attracted the notice of the first French colonists in 1562, still 

 abound, and perhaps the largest grape vine in the world is one eighteen 

 inches in diameter, near Sheldon Church, Beaufort County. Hay made 

 of Bermuda grasses, ranking in the market with the best imported hay, has 

 been profitably grown. Five acres at the Atlantic farm have, for a series 

 of years, yielded nine thousand pounds per acre yearly, and on the Stono 

 farm two tons one year, and four and a half another, has been made to 

 the acre. Winter vetches grow wild, and the vine of the cow pea fur- 

 nishes an abundant forage, besides increasing the fertility of the soil. The 

 red rust proof oat, recently introduced, is peculiarly adapted to the mild 

 winters of this region, yielding readily, and with great certainty, thirty to 

 fifty bushels per acre. Should an increase of the population call for a 

 larger food supply, the sweet potato would furnish it to an extent prac- 

 tically unlimited. Indigo, rice, hemp, beans, peanuts, the castor oil bean, 

 the sugar cane, and many other sub-tropical fruits and vegetables, too nu- 

 merous to catalogue here, have been successfully cultivated as field crops. 

 Indian corn, of the white flint variety, yields in the coast counties a little 

 more per acre than the average yield of the same crop throughout the 

 State. Nevertheless, only a very limited attention is bestowed on the 

 culture of any of these articles, the leading crop, to the exclusion or 

 dwarfing of all others, being 



LONG STAPLE COTTON. 



In every handful of ordinary cotton seed, three varieties, presenting 

 well marked differences, may be recognized at a glance. The largest of 

 these is covered with a green down ; another, smaller and much more 

 numerous seed, is covered, with a white or grayish down ; the third variety 

 is naked, smooth and black. Whether these three sorts of seed corres- 

 pond to three classes under which the numerous varieties of cotton are 

 arranged, that is, the green seed with gossypium hirsutum or shrub 

 cotton, attaining a height of ten or twelve feet, a native of Mexico, and 

 varying as an annual, biennial or perennial, according to the climate in 

 which it is grown ; the white seed, with gossypium herbaceum, or 

 herbaceous cotton, an annual, attaining a height of two feet, native of the 

 Coromandeb coast and the Nilgeherries ; the black seed, with gossypium 

 arboreum, or tree cotton, a native of the Indian Peninsular, but attaining 

 a height of one hundred feet on the Guinea coast, and producing a silky 



