Page:Madras Journal of Literature and Science, series 1, volume 6 (1837).djvu/105

1837.] of produce is the same, though the soil is thought inferior, while to Trichinopoly, the next highest, with a fertile soil, 31 maunds 8 lbs., or 783 lbs., is the greatest return, which, though so much lets than the above, is still more than doable the average return from the neighbouring districts of Tanjore, Salem, Coimbatore, Madura and Tinnevelly. The agriculturul processes are not detailed. From N. Arcot, Bellary, and Cuddapah, the two last the principal cotton districts of the peninsula, no reports have yet been received.

A slight inspection of the table will show that, in selecting the time for entering on the experiments here proposed, we are not to be guided by the Calendar, but by the local variations of the seasons, the principal of them being, to have well grown plants ready to transplant at what is now the usual season of sowing, with the view of ensuring a continued production of new shoots and flowers through a period of several months, an effect, that will be still further secured by occasional topping the extreme branches during the operations of weeding and hoeing.

Hitherto I have supposed the annual varieties the ones under trials though I consider the plan equally, or rather more applicable to the foreign sorts. But with respect to them something more may be done. In the districts where the Bourbon and American kinds are in cultivation, I would recommend that one or two fields, which have already produced their usual rotation, and are about to be ploughed up, should be opened to the grazing of cattle and sheep, and when they have taken all they can get from them, to have the woody stems cut down to the roots, the land well ploughed between the rows, and then left to produce a fresh crop of shoots on the return of the rains. The fourth crop of Bourbon cotton from the same roots is now usually considered scarcely worth the trouble of collection, and the American is cultivated as an annual, but might thus I apprehend be rendered biennial, or even perennial. In Persia we are told that the practice here recommended is annually practised, and that the same plants so treated, last many years (20 or 30), the land every season producing besides a crop of grain. If in this way we can get only one or two additional good crops from the same roots, a great saving would be effected, as it must cost much less to plough and manure the ground in this way, than to root out the old plants, allow it to lie fallow for a season, and then re-sow. The great size, and the depth to which the ramose roots must have previously penetrated, Will have placed the greater part of them beyond the reach of injury from the plough, and the new fresh manured soil with which