In 1697, in a memoir addressed to Count de Pontchartrain on the importance of establishing a colony in Louisiana, the author, after describing the natural productions of the country, says: "Such are some of the advantages which may be reasonably expected, without counting those resulting from every day's experience. We might, for example, try the experiment of cultivating long-staple cotton." The presumption is that the short-staple variety had already been tried. In the very beginning of the eighteenth century cotton culture in North Carolina had reached the extent of furnishing one-fifth of the people with their clothing. Lawson, speaking of the prosperity of the country and commending the industry of the women, says: "We have not only provision plentiful, but clothes of our own manufacture, which are made and daily increase; cotton, wool, and flax being of our own growth; and the women are to be highly commended for industry in spinning and ordering their housewifery to so great an advantage as they do." About this time cotton became widely distributed and cotton-patches were common in Carolina. In fact, it is said to have been one of the principal commodities of Carolina as early as 1708, but its culture was only for domestic uses, and the same authority speaks of its being spun by the women. Charlevoix, in 1722, while on his voyage down the Mississippi, saw "very fine cotton on the tree" growing in the garden of Sieur le Noir; and Captain Roman, of the British Army, saw in East Mississippi black-seeded cotton growing on the farm of Mr. Krebs, and also a machine invented by Mr. Krebs for the separation of the seed and lint. This was a roller-gin, and possibly the first ever in operation in this country. Pickett says that in 1728 the colony of Louisiana, which at that date occupied nearly all the southwest part of the United States, including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, was in a flourishing condition, its fields being cultivated, by more than two thousand slaves, in cotton, indigo, tobacco, and grain. Peter Purry, the founder of Purryville, in South Carolina, in his description of the Province of South Carolina, drawn up in Charleston in 1731, says, "Flax and cotton thrive admirably." In 1734 cotton-seed was planted in Georgia, being sent there by Philip Nutter, of Chelsea, England. Francis Moore, who visited Savannah in 1735, in his description of that place, says: "At the bottom of the hill, well sheltered from the north wind and in the warmest part of the garden, there was a collection of West Indian plants and trees, some coffee, some cocoa-nuts, cotton, etc."