From a passage in Pliny’s Natural History (lib. xix. cap. 1) it would appear that the cotton plant was cultivated in Upper Egypt in his day (A.D. 77), and this has been accepted as genuine and quoted by Dr. Ure[41] and others. But Mr. Yates, in his ‘_Textrinum Antiquorum_’ (p. 459), shows good reason for believing that the paragraph was interpolated in the text of one of the MSS. of Pliny’s work, after having been originally an annotation in the margin of an earlier copy. This explanation clears up an otherwise involved and disconnected passage, and there are other reasons besides those given by Mr. Yates for believing that his surmise is correct. [41] ‘The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain.’ Abdollatiph, an Arabian physician who visited Egypt at the end of the twelfth century, does not mention cotton in the account which he wrote (A.D. 1203), of the plants of that country; and Prospero Alpini, the Paduan physician and botanist, who some four centuries later directed his attention to the natural history of Egypt, says[42] that the Egyptians then imported cotton for their use, that the herbaceous kind (_Gossypium herbaceum_), from which cotton was obtained in Syria and Cyprus, did not grow in Egypt, but that the tree kind (_G. arboreum_) was cultivated as an ornamental plant in private gardens, and in very small quantities, its down not being used for spinning. [42] ‘_De Plantis Ægypti_,’ cap. 18. Belon, who was in Egypt about thirty years before Alpini, makes no mention of cotton growing there; but says that he found it in Arabia, at the north of the Arabian Gulf, near Mount Sinai. It would appear, therefore, that up to the beginning of the seventeenth century the Egyptians were importers, not cultivators, of cotton.