The latest intelligence from India apprises us that in one large cotton district the American planters have at length succeeded, and American cotton is now growing there on one hundred and forty-six thousand acres.

IN DARWAR.

In American Cotton.   In Native Kupas.    Total.
1851   31,688 acres      223,314 acres      255,002
1860  146,320  "         230,677  "         377,003

In Africa, also, the export of cotton is on the increase; and Egypt is erecting new works to retain and direct the overflow of the Nile, which will augment her exports.

There is a belt around the earth’s surface of at least sixty degrees in width, adapted in great part to the culture of cotton.  Great Britain now commands capital, while China and India overflow with labor.  Let Great Britain divert a few millions of this capital and but half a million of coolies to any fertile area of five thousand square miles within this belt, and she can in a few years double her supply of cotton, and command the residue of her importation at reasonable prices.

Among these spots none is more promising than Central America, where the cotton-plant is perennial, and a single acre, as we are assured by Mr. Squier, yields semiannually a bale of superior cotton.  But let us hope that the South may abandon her dream of a Southern Empire, and the chimera which now haunts her, that the Northerner is hostile to the Southerner, when in reality he has no such feeling, but merely recoils from institutions which he believes to be at variance with moral and material progress.

Hemp, or Cannabis sativa, from which we possibly derive the modern term canvas, was known to the ancients and used by them for rope and cordage and occasionally for cloth.  It was found early in Thrace, in Caria, and upon the Rhone.  Herodotus says that garments were made of it by the Thracians “so much like linen that none but an experienced person could tell whether they were made of hemp or of flax.”

Moschion, who flourished two centuries before the Christian era, states that the celebrated ship Syracusia built by Hiero II. was provided with rope made from the hemp of the Rhone.  Although the plant is indigenous in Northern India, where it is cultivated for its narcotic qualities, it is adapted to a southern climate; and we may safely infer that it was not a native of either Italy, Greece, or Asia Minor, but was doubtless introduced into Caria by the active trade between the Euxine and Miletus.  Cloth of hemp is still worn by boatmen upon the Danube; but although its fibre is nearly as delicate as that of flax and cotton, it is used principally for cordage, for which purpose it is imported from the interior of Russia into England and the United States.  In 1858 the entire importation into Great Britain was forty-four thousand tons.  A large amount is now raised in Missouri and Kentucky, whose soil is admirably adapted to the hemp-plant.  Hemp grows freely in Bologna, Romagna, and Naples, and the Italians have a saying, that “it may be grown everywhere, but cannot be produced fit for use in heaven or on earth without manure.”  The Italian hemp is aided by irrigation.