206 COTTOX PLANTER'S MANUAL. 



the soil and plant. The world has depended, from its earliest 

 ages, upon the first mode. With what success, the condition 

 of agriculture, until the past ten years, will best answer. 

 Improvement only reached a certain point, and that a very 

 low one, and then ceased. Practical farming was as good in 

 the days of Augustus as in the days of Washington. Farm- 

 ing was as well conducted in Italy eighteen hundred years 

 ago, as in the United States or England, twenty years ago. 

 Mere practice, then, without the aid of science, failed to lay 

 down a rational manuring system for the growth of wheat or 

 .any other crop ; and if practical experiment failed to do this 

 for wheat in eighteen centuries, how much less has it done for 

 cotton in fifty years ? How much more will it do for it in the 

 next five hundred 1 Agriculture, with the aid of both practi- 

 cal experiment and chemical science, has advanced, in the 

 manuring of the wheat crop, more within the last twenty 

 years than in the five hundred preceding it. Have we not, 

 then, just reason for the belief that if so much has been done 

 for the art of agriculture by the application of a science yet 

 in its youth, its manhood will give results which we now do 

 not dream of? Should not the cotton plant avail itself of this 

 new aid to its culture and productions, and use the means 

 which it affords with a liberal hand !..:...-. * 



The effect which we desire, is the production of the cotton 

 plant in its greatest perfection. 



The causes of production are the physical state of the soil, 

 the climate, the cultivation of the crop, and, when required, 

 manuring. We shall not speak of the physical character of 

 the soil in this place ; nor of the climate, because it is beyond 

 our influence ; nor of cultivation, because that can be best 

 done by the owner by means within his own control. 



What are the substances necessary to the growth of the cot- 

 ton plant ? Are all or any of these deficient in the soil ? If 



