THROUGH THE SOUTH. 



CULTIVATION BY STEAM IN LOUISIANA. 

 [editorial correspondence op the tribune.] 



New Orleans, May 17. — Ou oui- way down tbrougli Mississippi, 

 we made the acquaintance of Mr. H, E. Lawrence, a lifelong and 

 successful sugar-planter, who, on learning my anxiety to witness 

 Plowing by Steam (not for show, but as a business), invited us to 

 visit the plantation of his brother, where that style of breaking up 

 the earth is in fashion. Accordingly, a tug-boat was chartered, 

 and some forty or fifty gentlemen, including the Congi'essman of the 

 lower district, Gen. J. H. Sypher, Collector Casey, Judge Dibble, 

 several Editors, and my traveling companions, Gen. E. A. Merritt, 

 and Charles Storrs, Esq., devoted yesterday to Sugai'-planting by 

 Steam. 



Magnolia plantation lies some fifty miles below this city, having 

 a front of two miles on the west bank of the river, with the Gulf of 

 Mexico but five miles distant on either hand. Most of the ten-mile 

 strip which here constitutes the County (late parish) of Plaquemine 

 is a reedy marsh, the haUnt of alligators, musketoes, &c., which a 

 tempest in the Gulf may submerge at any time ; but a fine forest of 

 Live Oak on the rear of this plantation indicates that the surface 

 usually dry is wider at this point tlian the average. The famous 

 Levees are slight afiairs so near the Gulf, where the rise and fall of 

 the mighty stream (here a mile and a half wide) rarely exceeds three 

 feet, and at the utmost is seven. The i-iver-surface is now but two 

 to three feet below that of the Levees, and has recently been two 

 feet higher. Water leaking through the Levee is caught in the 

 substantial ditches that everywhere traverse the plantations, and 

 runs swiftly away till lost under the rank vegetation of the swamps 

 or absorbed by some bayou of the adjacent Gulf. This whole legion 

 has of course been formed of the muddy sediment deposited by the 

 Father of "Waters wherever the swiftness of its current is arrested. 

 Thus by ten thousand annual overflows, mainly in April or May, 



