COTTON CULTURE. 103 



penetrating frosts that, north of the Ohio and the Poto- 

 mac, for four or five months of each year, keep every peb- 

 ble in place, and open the surface in April in precisely the 

 same condition in which it was left in December. 



It would not seem to demand any remarkable inventive 

 power to accommodate the mode of plowing to the re- 

 quirements of the cotton soil in the United States ; but 

 nothing like circle plowing has been in general practice 

 until within twenty years past. 



The State Geologist of Mississippi, in that part of his 

 report which relates to cotton culture, says the idea was 

 first suggested by Thomas Jefferson, who had seen the 

 peasants of France conforming the curve of their farrows 

 with the slope of the hills on which they were plowing. 

 Mr. Jefferson was, for many years, a correspondent of Sir 

 William Dunbar, who had extensive plantations on the 

 steep but fertile hill lands that extend from the Missis- 

 sippi River, near Natchez, eastward to the Pine woods, 

 which, at the distance of thirty miles from the river, cover 

 the greater part of the country. Mr. Dunbar is said to 

 have been the first to practice circle plowing in Mississip- 

 pi. The simple good sense of the innovation on the old 

 and ruinous mode, at once recommended itself, and it be- 

 came almost universal among all enterprizing and well in- 

 formed planters through the South. But millions of acres 

 had been well nigh ruined and thrown out to sedge grass 

 and the foxes, before the improved mode was brought into 

 practice. In that part of Mississippi where it was first 

 adopted, the plowmen have acquired great skill and a 

 practiced eye, so that, give a man a good two-horse plow, 

 and he will engage to run it in such, a way that in the 

 softest soil, spread over an irregular group of steep hills, 

 hardly a ton of mould shall be washed into the bottoms 

 during the most rainy season. 



Probably the best way to begin this system is in con- 



