AGRICULTURE OF THE UNITED STATES. 
61 
introduced by man into the regions now remarkable for their 
most successful cultivation, and that, too, in comparatively 
recent times, or, in other words, within two or three centuries. 
Foreign Plants grown in the United States. 
According to Bigelow, the United States had, on the first 
of June, 1860, in round numbers, 163,000,000 acres of im¬ 
proved land, the quantity having been increased by 50,000,000 
acres within the ten years next preceding.* Not to men¬ 
tion less important crops, this land produced, in the year end¬ 
ing on the day last mentioned, in round numbers, 171,000,000 
bushels of wheat, 21,000,000 bushels of rye, 172,000,000 bush¬ 
els of oats, 15,000,000 bushels of pease and beans, 16,000,000 
bushels of barley, orchard fruits to the value of $20,000,000, 
900,000 bushels of cloverseed, 900,000 bushels of other grass 
seed, 104,000 tons of hemp, 4,000,000 pounds of flax, and 
600,000 pounds of flaxseed. These vegetable growths were 
familiar to ancient European agriculture, but they were all 
introduced into North America after the close of the sixteenth 
century. 
Of the fruits of agricultural industry unknown to the 
Greeks and Bomans, or too little employed by them to be 
of any commercial importance, the United States produced, 
in the same year, 187,000,000 pounds of rice, 18,000,000 bush¬ 
els of buckwheat, 2,075,000,000 pounds of ginned cotton,f 
* Les Mats Unis d'Amerique en 1863, p. 360. By “improved” land, in 
the reports on the census of the United States, is meant “ cleared land 
used for grazing, grass, or tillage, or which is now fallow, connected with 
or belonging to a farm.”— Instructions to Marshals and Assistants, Census 
of 1850, schedule 4, §§ 2, 3. 
f Cotton, though cultivated in Asia and Africa from the remotest an¬ 
tiquity, and known as a rare and costly product to the Latins and the 
Greeks, was not used by them to any considerable extent, nor did it enter 
into their commerce as a regular article of importation. The early voy¬ 
agers found it in common use in the West Indies and in the provinces first 
colonized by the Spaniards ; hut it was introduced into the territory of the 
United States by European settlers, and did not become of any importance 
