in St. Stephen's Parish,
South Carolina, wrote: "We find from experience our cotton seed one of the
strongest manures we make use of for our Indian corn; a pint of fresh seed
put around or in the corn hole makes the corn produce wonderfully",[25]
but it was not until the lapse of another decade or two that such practice
became widespread. In the thirties Harriet Martineau and J.S. Buckingham
noted that in Alabama the seed was being strewn as manure on a large
scale.[26] As an improvement of method the seed was now being given in many
cases a preliminary rotting in compost heaps, with a consequent speeding of
its availability as plant food;[27] and cotton seed rose to such esteem as
a fertilizer for general purposes that many planters rated it to be worth
from sixteen to twenty-five cents a bushel of twenty-five pounds.[28] As
early as 1830, furthermore a beginning was made in extracting cottonseed
oil for use both in painting and illumination, and also in utilizing the
by-product of cottonseed meal as a cattle feed.[29] By the 'fifties the oil
was coming to be an unheralded substitute for olive oil in table use; but
the improvements which later decades were to introduce in its extraction
and refining were necessary for the raising of the manufacture to the scale
of a substantial industry.

[Footnote 24: _Farmer's Gazette_ (Sparta, Ga.), Jan. 31, 1807.]

[Footnote 25: Letter of John Palmer. Dec. 3, 1808, to David Ramsay. MS. in
the Charleston Library.]

[Footnote 26: Harriet Martineau, _Retrospect of Western Travel_, (London,
1838), I, 218; I.S. Buckingham, _The Slave States of America_ (London,
1842), I, 257.]

[Footnote 27: D.R. Williams of South Carolina described his own practice to
this effect in an essay of 1825 contributed to the _American Farmer_ and
reprinted in H.T. Cook, _The Life and Legacy of David R. Williams_ (New
York, 1916), pp. 226, 227.]

[Footnote 28: J.A. Turner, ed., _Cotton Planter's Manual_, p. 99; Robert
Russell, _North America_, p. 269.]

[Footnote 29: _Southern Agriculturist_, II, 563; _American Farmer_, II, 98;
H.T. Cook, _Life and Legacy of David R. Williams_, pp. 197-209.]

The importation of fertilizers began with guano. This material, the dried
droppings of countless birds, was discovered in the early 'forties on
islands off the coast of Peru;[30] and it promptly rose to such high esteem
in England that, according to an American news item, Lloyd's listed for
1845 not less than a tho