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picking is begun as soon as a quantity of the capsules 

 have opened, and before any of the cotton has fallen to 

 the ground. Three well-timed pickings suffice to secure 

 the whole crop without any of it being allowed to fall to the 

 ground. It is thus got in clean and in the best condition. 



" To see the reverse of this, we have only to go twenty 

 miles often much less from the railway on the one or 

 two made roads, and the further we recede from them the 

 greater is the contrast. The ploughing becomes less 

 thorough ; the clods are not pulverized ; the seed is care- 

 lessly sown ; the plants are not thinned when thinning is 

 required ; the weed and grass are not eradicated, but 

 allowed to grow up, depriving the cotton-plants of their 

 nourishment, and stunting their growth. In places far 

 removed from the made-roads, it sometimes requires close 

 inspection to discover the cotton-plants amidst the more 

 luxuriant weeds and grass. 



" But the worst is still to come. The value of the cotton 

 in the remoter districts is not sufficient to induce the culti- 

 vator with his household to undertake the troublesome 

 work of picking it from the pods. It is allowed to fall to 

 the ground, and is then gathered up at one gathering, 

 with whatever soil may adhere to it. Should rain fall in 

 the interval, as happened last season, it is of course battered 

 into the black soil which is converted into mud ; and it is 

 thus lost, for all the purposes of commerce except adulte- 

 ration, though still available in some measure for the 

 cultivator's own use. 



"I need scarcely tell you that the latter phase of cotton- 

 culture is the original and normal one, in this part of 

 India at least, and that the extraordinarily different mode 

 recorded in the preceding paragraph, has been brought 



