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 to extend it until cultivation has so completely changed the character of the plant that it bears very little resemblance to its original stock. There is nothing growing wild like our cabbages, turnips, and cauliflowers; nor even like our carrots, celery, and asparagus. Where are the originals of our wheat, barley, rye, beans, and peas? Many of these appear to be so completely transformed by cultivation that we don't know where to look for the parent stocks from which they originated. But I am forgetting cotton altogether, yet beg to refer to the preceding paragraph to show how much is owing to careful cultivation, and trust that it may not be without its use if my letter induces your