JUTE, a vegetable fibre now occupying a position in the manufacturing scale inferior only to cotton and flax. The term jute appears to have been first used in 1746, when the captain of the "Wake" noted in his log that he had sent on shore "60 bales of gunney with all the jute rope" (_New Eng. Dict. s.v._). In 1795 W. Roxburgh sent to the directors of the East India Company a bale of the fibre which he described as "the jute of the natives." Importations of the substance had been made at earlier times under the name of _pat_, an East Indian native term by which the fibre continued to be spoken of in England till the early years of the 19th century, when it was supplanted by the name it now bears. This modern name appears to be derived from _jhot_ or _jhout_ (Sansk. _jhat_), the vernacular name by which the substance is known in the Cuttack district, where the East India Company had extensive roperies when Roxburgh first used the term. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--Capsules of Jute Plants. a, _Corchorus capsularis_; b, C. _olitorius_.] The fibre is obtained from two species of _Corchorus_ (nat. ord. _Tiliaceae_), _C. capsularis_ and _C. olitorius_, the products of both being so essentially alike that neither in commerce nor agriculture is any distinction made between them. These and various other species of _Corchorus_ are natives of Bengal, where they have been cultivated from very remote times for economic purposes, although there is reason to believe that the cultivation did not originate in the northern parts of India. The two species cultivated for jute fibre are in all respects very similar to each other, except in their fructification and the relatively greater size attained by _C. capsularis_. They are annual plants from 5 to 10 ft. high, with a cylindrical stalk as thick as a man's finger, and hardly branching except near the top. The light-green leaves are from 4 to 5 in. long by 1(1/2) in. broad above the base, and taper upward into a fine point; the edges are serrated; the two lower teeth are drawn out into bristle-like points. The small whitish-yellow flowers are produced in clusters of two or three opposite the leaves. The capsules or seed-pods in the case of _C. capsularis_ are globular, rough and wrinkled, while in _C. olitorius_ they are slender, quill-like cylinders (about 2 in. long), a very marked distinction, as may be noted from fig. 1, in which a and b show the capsules of _C. capsularis_ and _C. olitorius_ respectively. Fig. 2 represents a flowering top of _C. olitorius_.