The shrub _Parutti_, which produces the finer kind of cotton, requires in India little cultivation or care; and the tree _Ilava_ requires none at all. The former thrives best on the high mountainous districts; the latter in the flat open country. When the cotton has been gathered, it is thrown upon a floor and threshed, in order that it may be separated from the black seeds and the husks which served it as a covering. It is then put into bags, or tied up in bales, containing from 300 to 320 _Aratel_, or pounds of sixteen ounces each. After it has been carded, it is spun out into such delicate threads that a piece of cotton cloth twenty yards in length may almost be concealed in the hollow of both hands. Most of these pieces of cloth are twice washed; others remain as they come from the loom, and are dipped in coco-nut oil, in order that they may be longer preserved. It is customary also to draw them throw _Cangi_, or rice-water, that they may acquire more smoothness and body. The _Cangi_ is sometimes applied to cotton articles in so ingenious a manner that purchasers are often deceived, and imagine the cloth to be much stronger than it really is; for, as soon as it is washed, the _Cangi_ vanishes, and the cloth appears quite slight and thin. There are reckoned to be no less than twenty-two different kinds of cotton articles manufactured in India, without including muslin or coloured stuffs. The latter are not, as in Europe, printed by means of wooden blocks, but painted with a brush made of the fibres of the rind of the coco-nut, which, when beat, approaches near to horse-hair; becomes very elastic, and can be formed into any shape the painter chooses. The colours employed are indigo, _Indaco_, _Anil_, or _Coachan_, all appellations borrowed from foreign languages; and which signify, not a shrub, as some have erroneously asserted, but a plant which grows in great abundance in the district of Agra, and in other places of India. The stem and leaves of this plant yield that beautiful dark blue with which the Indian chintzes, coverlets, _tappisendis_ and other articles are painted, and which never loses the smallest shade of its beauty. Also _terra merita_, called _Curcuma_, or Indian saffron, a plant which dyes yellow; and, in the last place, gum lac, together with some flowers, roots and fruits, which are used to dye red. With these few pigments, which are applied sometimes singly, and sometimes mixed, the Indians produce on their cotton cloths that admirable and beautiful painting which exceeds every thing of the kind exhibited in Europe.