the sand has been packed in, weaken and impair it, and the sand injures the costly and delicate machinery of the mills. The capital available to the farmers of any neighborhood in the South is entirely adequate to make thorough reform in this most important, safest, and most profitable department of the manufacture of cotton. A gin-house constructed on the best plan, supplied with the new roller gins lately invented in England, that guarantee to surpass in quantity of cotton ginned as well as quality of lint our rude and imperfect saw gins, having automatic feeders to pass the picking to the gin, and an apron to receive the lint as it comes from the gin and carry it to the beater, or cleaner, where all the motes and dust can be taken from the freshly ginned fibre and then, instead of rolling this fleecy mass on a dirty floor, where it would catch every particle of dust and grit, to carry it direct to a Dedrick press that would compress forty pounds within a cubic foot, and reduce the little bale of one hundred and twenty pounds to the consistency of elm-wood, and as little liable to soak water or catch dirt—an establishment of this sort would add one cent per pound to every pound of cotton put through it, and would be worth more as an example than a dozen cotton factories. Annexed to this gin-house should be a huller to take the hulls from the seed and to this huller the seed should be taken as it comes from the gins. Once hulled, the hulls should be fed to the stock, restored to the soil, or sold, and the kernels sent to the nearest oil mill, the oil sold, and the meal fed to sheep or stock, or used as a fertilizer. These improvements, costing little, and within the skill of ordinary laborers, would bring as good a profit as could be realized by a factory involving enormous outlay, great risk, and the utmost skill of management. The importance of reform here will be seen when we state that there is half as much capital—say $70,000,000—invested in machinery for baling, pressing, and ginning cotton as there is invested in the United States in machinery for weaving and spinning it. So great has been the progress in invention, and so sluggish the cotton farmer to reform either his methods or his machinery, that experts agree that the ginning, pressing, and baling of the crop could be done with one-half or possibly one-third of the labor and cost of the present, and done so much better that the product would be worth ten per cent. more than it now commands, if the best machinery were bought, and the best methods employed.