EXPERIMENTS IN MANURING COTTON. 71 



tion in the cotton-growing States. My object, as expressed at 

 the time, was to have these experiments tested in various sec- 

 tions of the cotton-growing region. I gave the details care- 

 fully and minutely. I saw all the difficulties, and feared the 

 result in the hands of gentlemen less interested than myself. 

 The great principle of the improvement was a fixed fact. The 

 extraordinary yield of cotton, the small area of land, naturally 

 very poor, occupied in its production, and the home means 

 employed, were facts too striking, and of too much importance, 

 to be overlooked or slightly regarded by me. 



As I have stated previously, it mattered not in a " first, 

 crude experiment," what amount of personal trouble it gave 

 me to so adjust and arrange these home means to produce such 

 extraordinary results. The greatest difficulty connected with 

 this experiment, was the trouble in getting a stand, next to 

 an impossibility. I had never seen manure applied to crops 

 in any other way than in the hill, which succeeds finely with 

 corn, but with cotton it is entirely different. Where the ma- 

 nure applied in the hills for cotton is worth the labor of appli- 

 cation, and enough is used to produce a decided benefit, one 

 half the hills at least, will either fail to come up or die imme'- 

 diately after coming up. This is an inherent difficulty in the 

 plant itself, from its mode of germination, which I ascertained 

 during the three succeeding years that I devoted to the sub- 

 ject forthe express purpose of overcoming this main difficulty. 

 The cotton seed, in the process of germination, attracts from 

 the surrounding soil, and from the atmosphere, an unusual 

 amount of water, as compared with other seed undergoing 

 this process. Any artificial condition of the soil, which con- 

 centrates immediately about the cotton seed at this time an 

 undue quantity of alkaline, gaseous matter, causes this fluid, 

 contained in the tender, reticulated, or mesh-like incipient 

 vegetable fibre, to undergo a species of fermentation, which 



