800 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fourteen per cent seems a very large wastage from " middlings," 

 the grade my correspondent uses ; which. I attribute to his using 

 the Gulf and Southwest cottons — from Texas, Louisiana, Missis- 

 sippi, etc., made mostly by negro labor — in preference to cottons 

 from the upper counties of this State (Georgia), made largely by 

 white people — the farmers, their wives and children, who cer- 

 tainly handle the fleecy staple with far more care. The cotton 

 marketed at Marietta, in Cobb County, about twenty-five miles 

 above Atlanta, is generally beautifully white and clean. It is grown 

 much more abundantly than before 1860, and almost always by the 

 aid of fertilizers, which hasten the maturity of the cotton, so that 

 the crop of that part of the country is much sooner prepared for 

 market than in the lower counties, where it was often plowed in 

 to make way for the new crop. The prejudice in favor of the Gulf 

 cotton has always seemed to me to be unfounded, though I know 

 it to prevail in Old as well as in New England, and generally in 

 the North. These Northern spinners have often bought uplands 

 in New Orleans, shipped from Columbus and Macon in this State. 

 An old planter, who had also been a large cotton-buyer and a 

 manufacturer as well, always combated this idea. When the yarn 

 has fourteen to twenty turns of twist to the inch of length, it will 

 certainly fulfill all the necessary conditions as to twist, as well as if 

 the fibers were half as long again as they are. American spinners 

 use a much higher grade of cotton for low numbers than the 

 English spinners, to which I attribute the statement made to me 

 by a Georgian of very high intelligence, who spent a number of 

 years in China, and said that the Chinese greatly preferred 

 American to English cloth, and I believe he said yarn also. 



There is also, in my judgment, a very considerable advantage 

 which the Southern spinner enjoys over his outside competitors ; in 

 that he receives his cotton in the loosely packed planter's pack- 

 age, measuring in depth twenty-eight to thirty-six inches, while 

 his competitors receive the same staple from the compresses, in 

 which the bale is squeezed down to a thickness of eight or ten 

 inches under hundreds of tons of pressure. It must be brought 

 into a flocculent state again before it can be carded and spun. 

 Does it not go without saying that the loosely packed cotton in 

 the planter's bale will require less violent tearing to restore its 

 lightness and elasticity than that which has been packed for 

 months under the compress with its enormous power ? I have 

 seen myself, often, cotton "in the seed" brought to the mill, 

 weighed in two and four-horse wagons, without any baling at all, 

 ginned in the mill, and spun at once. 



Now as to some other points. Suppose that I build two mills 

 for myself (to insure the same management exactly). Let them 

 be exact counterparts of each other, except that the machinery of 



