(8) 



45- Low middling. 



46. Middling. 



47. Middling fair. 



48. Good middling. 



49. Fair. 



50. Ginned Sea Island cotton. From the Clark Thread Company. 



51. Ginned Egyptian cotton. From the Clark Thread Company. 



Cotton Yarn 



Cotton yarn is employed for weaving into cloth. It is 

 produced by a series of manufacturing processes which 

 begin with the removal of the cotton from the bale and its 

 separation into a loose mass which can be easily handled. 

 The machine which performs this work is the bale-breaker. 

 In the process, much of the coarse foreign matter is removed 

 from the cotton. The next process is lapping and blending. 

 A thin layer, known as a lap, is taken from each variety or 

 grade of cotton that is to enter into the mixture and these 

 laps are laid one upon another, in the desired order and 

 amount, until a suitable pile has been formed. The cotton, 

 as it is to be used, is then cut off in slices from the sides of 

 this pile. This cotton is then run through one or more 

 scutching machines which remove the impurities and some- 

 what straighten it. It is then carded, in order to still 

 further clean and straighten it. It is then put through a 

 number of machines which more thoroughly intermingle 

 the fibers of the different grades originally mixed. In this 

 work several strands or cords are run through a machine 

 which unites them into one lap. Several of these laps are 

 united similarly, and this process is repeated until the inter- 

 mingling is perfected. Most of these machines remove 

 remaining impurities from the lap. From the final lap 

 the yarn is spun by a machine called the spinning-jinney. 

 The yarn is then put through one or more boiling processes 

 to cleanse and free it from fat, after which it is bleached or 

 dyed and wound upon spools or formed into hanks. 



52. A dried specimen of the American upland cotton plant, Gossypium punctatum 

 Sch. & Thon. 



