1837.] 



Remarks on the Cultivation of Cotton* 



107 



Our aim, on the contrary, is to counteract this rapid course, and per- 

 mit the plant to attain a greater degree of maturity before beginning to 

 bear, in the hope by so doing that the quality of the produce may be 

 improved and augmented, at the same time that the duration of the plant 

 is prolonged. The tendency of the plant to shoot its root straight 

 down into the earth to a considerable depth, where, even in the dryest 

 season, it enjoys constant humidity and coolness, enables us to accom- 

 plish this object, and at once change its habit from annual to perennial. 

 So far as our attempts to cultivate this valuable variety have yet ex- 

 tended, we have not found any soil in India equally congenial with the 

 American ones, but we certainly ought not to give up the attempt to 

 find similar ones ; for, if we succeed, owing to the perennial character of 

 our plant, we may expect, if such is possible, even better cotton than 

 the original, on the strength of our second and third crops of other pe- 

 rennial kinds, being somewhat better than the first. The light saline 

 soils of the coast, it appears to me, are those most likely to approach 

 the American ones, while, from being more easily penetrable by the 

 roots, they hold out the prospect of being better suited to this kind of 

 culture than the more stiff and clayey ones of the interior, while their 

 saline impregnation will no doubt contribute to aid the so called saline 

 atmosphere, held to be so necessary in America, but which, according 

 to their own showing, is not enough. 



Thus it is stated that the cotton plant thrives best in an alluvial soil 

 a little impregnated with salt — that the most productive soils in Louisi- 

 ana are deeply tinged with red, and well impregnated with salt — in 

 Guiana, salt is considered to promote the growth of the cotton plant, 

 and the old lands are frequently flooded with salt-water. These state- 

 ments of the value of a saline soil, the existence of which is susceptible 

 of demonstration, afford strong grounds for doubting the doctrine of a 

 saline atmosphere, a questionable propel^, and lead us to infer, that 

 the superiority of our black soils for the production of cotton is partly 

 attributable to the saline matter with which they are so generally im- 

 pregnated. 



Regarding the experiments, mentioned in the first part of this 

 paper, as in progress in my garden, I may take this oppor- 

 tunity of adding, that, owing to the intervention of some errors, 

 but too apt to occur in first experiments to mar success, they have not 

 hitherto gone on so prosperously as I could have wished. They may, 

 however, be adduced, as affording a striking exemplification of the 

 tenacity of life of the cotton plant, for, though transplanted, in very 

 dry weather, into ground inadequately prepared, scarcely a plant was 

 lost. In the instance of the short stapled American plants, I have 

 failed in accomplishing one of my objects, that of preventing the early 

 flowering, for they are now, though but few of them exceed nine 



