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brought peculiar advantages, holding his professorial chair in the great 

 cotton-growing State of Alabama (North America), having been the 

 editor of the Government Geological Report of that State, and having 

 had placed at his disposal (for experiment and comparison) by the 

 Indian Government, a magnificent collection, specially made, of the 

 various cotton soils and plants of India, as well as the like from other 

 Powers. 



The author remarks that, although an examination of the conditions 

 under which the cotton plant may be cultivated with success is one 

 of much interest both in a scientific and economic point of view, yet it 

 is strange that science, botanical, chemical, and climatological, should 

 as yet have supplied so little information with respect to this plant, 

 the most important source of the clothing of man. That, while other 

 cultivated species, many of them of far less general value, have been 

 the objects of careful experimental research their botanical relation 

 and improvement by hybridization settled the character and extent 

 of their demands for atmospheric and mineral food ascertained the 

 soils upon which they thrive or fail analysed the climatal conditions 

 which favour or impede their growth observed, the culture of cotton 

 under favourable circumstances has, as an art, been advanced in one 

 great locality almost to perfection, but without the scientific princi- 

 ples upon which the art is based, and by the application of which 

 alone success or failure in any new attempts elsewhere and under new 

 conditions can be predicted. He shows that the immediate cause of 

 this neglect of the science of cotton-culture has been the facility with 

 which the vast and growing demand of the world for cotton has been 

 met by the vast surface of fertile and virgin soil and other favour- 

 able conditions of the southern states of North America, yielding 

 wealth to the planter too readily to incite him to inquire much as 

 to the conditions of his success. 



Although much virgin soil remains in the southern states un- 

 touched by the cotton-planter, the author states that it needs but 

 slight knowledge of the country to discover the vast extent of " worn- 

 out " cotton fields already existing even in the most recently settled 

 states, or to predict a time when the growing demands for the 

 staple must compel, there and elsewhere, the attention of the eco- 

 nomist to the scientific aspects of the problem of cotton- cultivation. 

 To fix with exactness the conditions under which the cotton plant 



