=Cotton-growing in China.=--Owing to the great difficulty of obtaining any reliable statistical information, it is impossible to give anything approaching accuracy as to number of pounds of cotton produced annually, or number of acres devoted to the cultivation of the Cotton plant. This much, however, is known, that for many centuries cotton cultivating has been followed and that there has been within recent years a great increase in the weight of the cotton crop as well as in the acreage. The type of plant most generally cultivated is the herbaceous, and the cotton resulting is only poor in quality. Little or no preparation is made before sowing seed, which is generally done broadcast. As a result there is much overcrowding, and as is inevitable, there is produced a stubby plant with small bolls and much unripe cotton. On the terraces of the hillsides something approaching cultivation is pursued, with the result of a better crop. Usually twenty weeks intervene between planting and picking, this latter operation being mostly the work of children and women. The old cotton stalks are afterward collected and dried for fuel. Very few large plantations exist in China, most of them being only a few acres in extent. But little of the cotton grown at home is exported, most of it being spun and woven by women, though some of the fibre is sent to Japan. =Cultivation of Cotton in Egypt.=--It is now over thirty years since Sir Samuel Baker, the great African traveller, wrote these words: "The Nile might be so controlled that the enormous volume of water that now rushes uselessly into the Mediterranean might be led through the deserts, to transform them into cotton fields that would render England independent of America." The crop for the season 1900-01 was no less than 1,224,000 bales of 500 pounds each. Ten years ago only 868,000 acres were devoted to cotton cultivation as against 1,350,000 acres laid down to-day. Everything, then, points to Sir Samuel Baker's statement becoming an actual fact much sooner than the famous traveller himself anticipated. Egypt enjoys many advantages over her competitors across the Atlantic. In the first place, she can get almost twice as much cotton from the acre, so productive is the soil. Labour is cheaper, and the plant itself when young is not subject to the devastating frosts so often met with in America. Egypt is divided into three great areas:--Lower Egypt, which includes the whole of the Delta of the Nile; Upper Egypt; and Nubia. It is in the first-named district where the whole of Egyptian cotton is produced. At the present time immense sums are being spent on irrigation and drainage works, and as these are extended the areas devoted to cotton production will greatly increase. At the present time five distinct varieties of cotton are cultivated-- Mitafifi. Bamia. Abbasi. Gallini. Ashmouni-Hamouli.