ANALYSES OF COTTON PLANT AND SEED. 187 



subjects. Originally the production of the tropics, it has, in 

 our country, travelled far into the temperate region, and flour- 

 ishes on a belt of several hundred miles wide ; extending from 

 Virginia along the sea coast to our western limits on the Gulf 

 of Mexico. Congeniality of climate, seasons and soils, has 

 carried the cultivation of this plant, which is not certainly 

 ascertained to have been indigenous to the United States, 

 much further than it was at first expected it would ever be 

 extended ; and it has become the staple of all those parts not 

 actually mountainous in the southern States. Whilst its cul- 

 ture has most rapidly advanced and increased in every sec- 

 tion, the planters of the old cotton-growing States, from the 

 exhaustion of their soils, and the lack of proper systems of 

 rotation and manuring, have been thrown in the back 

 ground in the scale of profitable production by their more 

 favored rivals, the fortunate possessors of the virgin lands of 

 the south-west. If this deficiency is ever to be remedied 

 if the fertility of those soils, worn out in the oft-repeated pro- 

 duction of cotton, is ever to be restored, and permanently im- 

 proved for the future culture of this crop, or for other systems 

 of tillage, it must be done under a proper understanding of 

 what constituents are to be restored to the soil, to supply the 

 places of those of which it has been robbed. How far a cor- 

 rect analysis of the cotton plant and seed, will enable the 

 present generation of planters to remedy the lack of fertility 

 in their impoverished soils, and enhance their future produc- 

 tiveness for this crop, it is difficult to determine ; but it is no 



that cotton is so called from its similitude to the down which adhered to 

 the quince, malie cydoniis, which the Italians call cotogni, and cotoquy 

 manifestly a cydonis. 



Gossypium, or cotton, a genus of the polyandria order, belonging to the 

 monadelphia class of plants, and in the natural method of ranking, under 

 the thirty-seventh order, Columniferge Encyc. Britannia, vol. 8,p. 21. 



