It commences by a black spot on the rind, which, increasing, seems to produce fermentation and decay.  Worms find their way to the roots; the caterpillar eats into the “boll” and destroys the staple.  It would be almost impossible to enumerate all the evils the cotton-plant is heir to, all of which, however, sink into nothingness compared with the scourge of the “army-worm.”

The moth that indicates the advent of the army-worm has a Quaker-like simplicity in its light, chocolate-colored body and wings, and, from its harmless appearance, would never be taken for the destroyer of vast fields of luxuriant and useful vegetation.

The little, and, at first, scarcely to be perceived caterpillars that follow the appearance of these moths, can absolutely be seen to grow and swell beneath your eyes as they crawl from leaf to leaf.  Day by day you can see the vegetation of vast fields becoming thinner and thinner, while the worm, constantly increasing in size, assumes at last an unctuous appearance most disgusting to behold.  Arrived at maturity, a few hours only are necessary for these modern locusts to eat up all living vegetation that comes in their way.  Leaving the localities of their birth, they will move from place to place, spreading a desolation as consuming as fire in their path.

All efforts to arrest their progress or annihilate them prove unavailing.  They seem to spring out of the ground, and fall from the clouds; and the more they are tormented and destroyed, the more perceptible, seemingly, is their power.  We once witnessed the invasion of the army-worm, as it attempted to pass from a desolated cotton-field to one untouched.  Between these fields was a wide ditch, which had been deepened, to prove a barrier to the onward march of the worm.  Down the perpendicular sides of the trench the caterpillars rolled in untold millions, until its bottom, for nearly a mile in extent, was a foot or two deep in a living mass of animal life.  To an immense piece of unhewn timber was attached a yoke of oxen, and, as this heavy log was drawn through the ditch, it seemed absolutely to float on a crushed mass of vegetable corruption.  The following day, under the heat of a tropical sun, the stench arising from this decaying mass was perceptible the country round, giving a strange and incomprehensible notion of the power and abundance of this destroyer of the cotton crop.

The change that has been effected by the result of the Rebellion, will not be confined to the social system alone.  With the end of slavery there will be a destruction of many former applications of labor.  Innovations have already been made, and their number will increase under the management of enterprising men.

In Louisiana several planters were using a “drill” for depositing the cotton-seed in the ground.  The labor of planting is reduced more than one-half, and that of “scraping” is much diminished.  The saving of seed is very great—­the drill using about a tenth of the amount required under the old system.