THE TECHNOLOGIST. [April 1, 1865 



416 THE INDIGENOUS VEGETATION OP 



a fashion by turning the water on them whenever the river rose 

 sufficiently high, which in some years was for two or three months, and 

 in others perhaps for only a few days ; but it was rare that any one 

 cotton-grower could bring more than a hundred cargoes to market in a 

 season. By far the greater part of the cotton has in fact been produced 

 by the Indians, especially by those of Catacaos, on the Piura, and of 

 Colan, on the Chira, who have each their small plot of land by the river- 

 side. There the cotton is planted either on the vega, where it gets an 

 annual watering from the rise of the river, or on the adjacent low land, 

 where the plants have to be watered by hand until their roots penetrate 

 to a good depth. Sowing is generally done just after the floods have 

 subsided and left the vega dry, say in April, and nine months afterwards 

 the first crop is ripe. The plants receive no further care, except perhaps 

 to facilitate the access of the water to their roots at the time of the 

 annual floods, and they are never pruned ; yet after the first crop they 

 yield again every six months, and go on bearing cotton for six or seven 

 years, wheu the cotton beginning to deteriorate, the bushes are stubbed 

 up and the ground resown. The Indian's wife and children pick the 

 cotton when ripe, and to clear it from the seed take it out on the despo- 

 blado, select a space of a few feet in extent where there is only clean 

 white sand (not mixed with dust), which they smooth down and beat the 

 cotton thereon with slender sticks, one in each hand, until it is quite 

 separated from the'seeds. Then with a slight shake every grain of sand 

 falls out, and the cotton remains in a white felty sheet, called a madeja, 

 and is thus sold to the merchants for exportation, at so much the pound 

 weight, or the arroba of 25 lbs. ; but if it be intended for the country 

 weavers, it is first spun into pabilo, as in ancient times. The loose seed 

 of the Piura cotton makes this rude process practicable, which it woidd 

 not be in varieties that have the cotton adherent to the seed. Latterly, 

 gins have been got out from North America and set up at Payta and on 

 the Chira, whereby much of the cleaning by hand has been superseded. 



When the supply of cotton to England from the United States was 

 suspended by the breaking out of the civil war, many Englishmen and 

 North Americans, resident in Peru, turned their attention to the practi- 

 cability of growing cotton there on a large scale ; and one of them, Mr. 

 Alfred Duvall, presented a memorial to the Manchester Cotton Supply 

 Association, dated Baltimore, February, 1861, recommending the north 

 of Peru as a favourable locality for the employment of English capital 

 and labour in cotton cultivation. The author is led away by enthusiasm 

 forhis subject into a little exaggeration of the advantages, and lessening 

 of the difficulties incident to such an undertaking ; but, apart from that, 

 his memorial contains many valuable hints and details, showing far 

 more practical acquaintance with the subject than I can pretend to. 

 He insists that the climate, although tropical, is temperate and salu- 

 brious, such as a white man can bear to work in all the year round, and 

 that, therefore, there is no necessity for African labour, slave or free. 



