Cotton of one kind and another is grown all over Brazil. There seems to be no region which refuses to mother it. But the best lands, yielding most prolifically and with large areas suitable for cultivation on a great scale are in the centre, on the north-east promontory, and all along the coast to the mouth of the Amazon. Comparatively very small fragments of this belt are under cotton culture, although wild cotton and patches of cultivation of more or less merit are widely scattered; Todd, in his _World’s Cotton Crop_ says that Brazil “might easily grow twenty million bales, but her actual crop does not yet reach half a million bales.” Now, with the encouraging measures taken by the Brazilian Government as well as the enterprise of individual firms and planters, and the new realization of the opportunity waiting for the farmer with small capital but large technical skill, experience and good sense, cotton culture should open up great spaces of land suitable for this well-rewarding form of agriculture. Brazilian cottons or their Peruvian and West Indian kin have endowed the world with fine varieties; it remains for their standardization to benefit the land of their origin. Cotton was used by the Aztecs for making elaborate clothes, richly dyed and embroidered, long before the Spanish Conquest in 1520. Farther south, the carvings of the Maya show that that race was using textiles hundreds of years previously—as early as the beginning of the Christian Era, if the dates assigned to the Copán and Quiriguá temples are correct. In Brazil, where the inhabitants were much less socially and industrially developed, small domestic use was made of the fibre, but it had its name, _amaniú_. Cotton (_Gossypium_) belongs to the natural order of the malvaceas, claims more kin in the New than in the Old World, and its parents are genuine tropical dwellers; there seems to be little doubt that the first of the fine, long staple cottons introduced into North America were perennials, and that they became annuals only because they were unable to survive the winter cold. Names of cottons grown in Brazil leave the searcher after details rather hazy on account of the many local appellations given them, but the scientist has classified them by the characteristics of their seeds, dividing them into eleven kinds. The first, _Gossypium herbaceum_, is not a tropical native, was brought in from Asia both here and to the United States, is not common or successful, and so may be dismissed.