62 
AGRICULTURE OF THE UNITED STATES. 
302,000,000 pounds of cane sugar, 16,000,000 gallons of cane 
molasses, 7,000,000 gallons of sorghum molasses, all yielded 
by vegetables introduced into that country within two hundred 
years, and—with the exception of buckwheat, the origin of 
which is uncertain, and of cotton—all, directly or indirectly, 
from the East Indies; besides, from indigenous plants unknown 
to ancient agriculture, 830,000,000 bushels of Indian corn or 
maize, 429,000,000 pounds of tobacco, 110,000,000 bushels of 
potatoes, 42,000,000 bushels of sweet potatoes, 39,000,000 
pounds of maple sugar, and 2,000,000 gallons of maple mo¬ 
lasses. To all this we are to add 19,000,000 tons of hay, 
produced partly by new, partly by long known, partly by 
exotic, partly by native herbs and grasses, an incalculable 
quantity of garden vegetables, chiefly of European or Asiatic 
origin, and many minor agricultural products. 
The weight of this harvest of a year would he not less than 
60,000,000 tons—which is eleven times the tonnage of all the 
shipping of the United States at the close of the year 1861— 
and, with the exception of the maple sugar, the maple molas¬ 
ses, and the products of the Western prairie lands and some 
small Indian clearings, it was all grown upon lands wrested 
from the forest by the European race within little more than 
two hundred years. The wants of Europe have introduced 
into the colonies of tropical America the sugar cane, the coffee 
plant, the orange and the lemon,* all of Oriental origin, have 
until after the Revolution. Cotton seed was sown in Virginia as early as 
1621, but was not cultivated with a view to profit for more than a century 
afterward. Sea-island cotton was first grown on the coast of Georgia in 
1786, the seed having been brought from the Bahamas, where it had been 
introduced from Anguilla. —Bigelow, Les Mats Unis en 1863, p. 370. 
* The sugar cane was introduced by the Arabs into Sicily and Spain as 
early as the ninth century, and though it is now scarcely grown in those 
localities, I am not aware of any reason to doubt that its cultivation might 
be revived with advantage. From Spain it was carried to the West Indies, 
though different varieties have since been introduced into those islands 
from other sources. Tea is now cultivated with a certain success in Brazil, 
and promises to become an important crop in the Southern States of the 
American Union. The lemon is, I think, readily recognizable, by Pliny’s 
