According to the census of 1870, the United States had, on the first of June in that year, in round numbers, 189,000,000 acres of improved land, the quantity having been increased by 16,000,000 acres within the ten years next preceding. [Footnote: Ninth Census of the United States, 1872, p. 841. By "improved" land, in the reports on the census of the United States, is meant "cleared land" used for grazing, grass, or tillage, or which is now fallow, connected with or belonging to a farm."--Instructions to Marshals and Assistants, Census of 1870.] Not to mention less important crops, this land produced, in the year ending on the day last mentioned, in round numbers, 288,000,000 bushels of wheat, 17,000,000 bushels of rye, 282,000,000 bushels of oats, 6,000,000 bushels of peas and beans, 30,000,000 bushels of barley, orchard fruits to the value of $47,000,000, 640,000 bushels of cloverseed, 580,000 bushels of other grass seed, 13,000 tons of hemp, 27,000,000 pounds of flax, and 1,730,000 bushels of flaxseed. These vegetable growths were familiar to ancient European agriculture, but they were all introduced into North America after the close of the sixteenth century. Of the fruits of agricultural industry unknown to the Greeks and Romans, or too little employed by them to be of any commercial importance, the United States produced, in the same year, 74,000,000 pounds of rice, 10,000,000 bushels of buckwheat, 3,000,000 bales of cotton, [Footnote: Cotton, though cultivated in Asia from the remotest antiquity, and known as a rare and costly product to the Latins and the Greeks, was not used by them except as an article of luxury, nor did it enter into their commerce to any considerable extent as a regular object of importation. The early voyagers found it in common use in the West Indies and in the provinces first colonized by the Spaniards; but it was introduced into the territory of the United States by European settlers, and did not become of any importance until after the Revolution. Cottonseed was sown in Virginia as early as 1621, but was not cultivated with a view to profit for more than a century afterwards. Sea-island cotton was first grown on the coast of Georgia in 1786, the seed having been brought from the Bahamas, when it had been introduced from Anguilla--BIGELOW, Les Etats-Unis en 1868, p. 370]. 87,000 hogsheads of cane sugar, 6,600,000 gallons of cane molasses, 16,000,000 gallons of sorghum molasses, all yielded by vegetables introduced into that country within two hundred years, and--with the exception of buckwheat, the origin of which is uncertain, and of cotton--all, directly or indirectly, from the East Indies; besides, from indigenous plants unknown to ancient agriculture, 761,000,000 bushels of Indian corn, 263,000,000 pounds of tobacco, 143,000,000 bushels of potatoes, 22,000,000 bushels of sweet potatoes, 28,000,000 pounds of maple sugar, and 925,000 gallons of maple molasses.