to the height of five or six feet, and sending off branches. It is an annual plant, produced from seed. The young ones come up, some male, some female; the former, furnished only with flowers producing a farina or dust; the latter, yielding the seed. Hemp thrives best in a rich moist soil, especially on the banks of rivers; and it prefers the temperate climates to the hot, and appears to be a native of most of the north of Europe, where it has been cultivated for ages. When come to maturity, it is plucked up and laid to rot, like flax. Its fibrous part consists in the bark surrounding the main stalk, within which is a hard woody part, of no use. It is therefore necessary either to strip off the bark, or, by hard beating, to convert the inner portion to a dust, which may fly away. Hemp undergoes the same general preparation as flax before it is consigned to the weaver; but being of a stronger and coarser texture, it requires more labour to get the fine fibres separate from the rest. Hence it is commonly employed in the more homely manufactures, and hempen cloth is seldom made finer than to serve for sheeting and shirts for the lower classes, for which

purposes it was formerly grown and manufactured in Suffolk, and largely imported from Russia. It is the principal material of sailcloth, a fabric the strength of which is required to be proportional to the violence it has to undergo from storms and tempests. Hemp is rendered still more important to navigation from its use in making cordage. For this purpose it is taken nearly in a raw state and twisted first into coarse twine, which is afterwards united to make rope; and several ropes twisted together go to form a cable of strength and thickness sufficient to hold the largest man of war at her anchors. Chain cables, however, have in part superseded it for this purpose. The consumption of hemp in a maritime nation like this is prodigious, on which account vast stores of it are constantly laid up in our naval arsenals. But we are now got beyond our proposed subject of materials for clothing, and it is time to conclude.

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LETTER XII.

VEGETABLE CLOTHING CONTINUED.

You now have seen, my dear boy, that the inhabitant of the northern and temperate regions, has been obliged to exercise much labour and contrivance in procuring his vegetable clothing from the stalks of plants. In the meantime the native of the fruitful south has been enjoying the benefit of a material presented in greater abundance; and in a state requiring much less preparation before it is fitted for the manufacturer. This is cotton, a plant the history of which ought to be familiarly known to every one, in a country where it supplies the raw material of the greatest and most lucrative manufacture ever carried on in the world; one the products of which have superseded wool in the proud distinction of being held the staple commodity of England.

The name cotton has been adopted into modern European languages from an Arabic word for the same thing, which, put into English letters, would be pronounced kutum. Gossypium, the name given by botanists to the genus of plants which yields the different kinds of true cotton, is almost exactly the gossipion of Pliny's "Natural History.” Cotton belongs to the natural order of malvaceous, or mallow-like plants, of which you no doubt are acquainted with several garden species, such as the hollyhock, the lavatera, the alcea; and two or three wild mallows. besides. The cotton plant is distinguished by large handsome flowers of a yellow orange, or reddish colour, with five petals. The seedvessel is divided into either three or five cells, each containing several seeds, which are completely covered with long down, closely adhering to them. While the seeds are unripe, they remain covered with a capsule, or husk; but this, after a time, splits from the top downwards, and the seeds push through the opening, wrapped in their down, forming light elegant balls of the purest white, or of pale yellow, or reddish

brown of various shades, which, if not gathered, are quickly blown away and dispersed. The leaves are large and deeply cut, a good deal resembling those of the vine. There are several varieties, some herbaceous, some shrubby, and some reaching the stature of a small tree.

In

The cotton plant is very impatient of cold, and whether in a wild or cultivated state, is only found between the tropics and in the warmest parts of the temperate zones. Asia its northern limit is formed by the Himalaya Mountains, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea. It is confined in Europe to the more southern of the Mediterranean islands, and a few sheltered spots on the shores of Spain, Italy, and Greece. On the continent of America it is scarcely found north of Carolina, or south of Chili and Brazil. In the Indian Ocean it grows on the islands to the north of Australia, and its culture is extending to that new continent itself. It is likewise found in Otaheite, and in several of the groups of islands of the South Sea. Thus it belongs to the happy climates of every quarter of the globe. In the Old World it