from the plants on their estates which they see are growing the best and finest cotton, and sow them in contact with a few seeds of each of the sorts you may send out, carefully removing them in every instance as far as may be practicable from the vicinity of all other cotton; and then again sowing the seeds which are obtained from the plants thus raised in contiguity to each other, and carefully examining the cotton grown upon each of them, it is more than probable they will find that some of the plants will be varieties partaking of the character of both the parent kinds, and by selecting the best of these and sowing them only (still apart from all other cotton), there is little doubt that much benefit will be derived by the persevering and skilful cultivator.

I have heard it stated that the origin of Sea Island cotton is to be traced to something of this kind.  An observing and experimental planter, by carefully examining his cotton, and by sowing his seed only from those plants that produced the finest and longest staple, at last arrived at the excellent quality which is now known by that name.

Look, again, at what has been done in Egypt by the introduction of better varieties of cotton.  There these improved varieties have by no means had a fair chance of showing what they are capable of becoming, inasmuch as the wretched cultivator has not the slightest inducement to improve their quality—­he gets no more per pound for the finest and cleanest cotton than he does for the coarsest and dirtiest, and therefore it is not very likely to improve under his care.  But with all this neglect and want of management, we can see by what it is, what it would most probably become in the hands of an enterprising and intelligent man who knew that every improvement he made in its quality would be to his own advantage.  Assuming that your Peruvian friends could so far improve the quality of their cotton as to double its value in this market (and I don’t think myself too sanguine in expecting more than this), with very little extra labour nearly all the additional price would be profit.

But supposing even that cross-breeding, or hybridizing, as the horticulturists call it, does not frequently occur naturally in cotton, it is well known that it is very easy to effect it artificially by prematurely unfolding the petals and with fine scissors cutting away all the stamens before impregnation takes place.  This requires to be carefully done, so as not to injure the petals, and they will then close again of themselves, and when they expand naturally, then impregnate the stigma of the flower with the pollen of the kind you want to cross with.  We owe many of our finest varieties of fruits to this practice.  The late Mr. Payne Knight was very successful in raising new varieties of many sorts of fruit in this way, and it appears to me from the experiments I have made that the more frequently this cross-breeding takes place, the more easy (within certain limits) is it