12 



CIRCULAR NO. 123, BUREAU OF PLANT INDUSTRY. 



weatherboardino- and lined with matched kimber. The inner parti- 

 tions were also of matched material, but of one thickness only. 



A ventilator about 2 feet long by 10 inches in width, covered with 

 fine wire screen, was placed in the outer wall of the building next to 

 the ceiling of each bin, and the communicating doorways between bins 

 were kept open most of the time, thus aft'ording a limited circulation 

 of air above the stored cotton. 



On September 30, when tlie final arrangements for the work had 

 been completed, bin A contained a fairly large bulk of seed cotton 



weighing about 10,000 pounds, com- 

 posed of early pickings. On October 

 1 this cotton was removetl to bin B, 

 and the first lot of cotton to be used 

 throughout the storage season was 

 forked from the loft into bin A below. 

 Arrangements were immediately made 

 for placing this bulk on a definite floor 

 space, burying in it at selected depths 

 and in difi'erent parts 10 electrical ther- 

 mometer bulbs with leads of suitable 

 length for attaching in the aisle outside 

 to a regular balance indicator with 

 galvanometer. This cotton had been 

 })icked on vSeptember 25 and had re- 

 mained m the loft one week. It 

 weighed 5,800 pounds and when thor- 

 ouglily tramped had a density of about 

 12.3 pounds per cubic foot in the pile. 

 The average depth of the cotton as fin- 

 ally left for the experiment was 3.5 feet. 

 This body of cotton is designated as 

 pile 1 in figure 1 . 



On October 2, for purposes of com- 

 parison, a freshly picked lot of cot- 

 ton weighing 6,180 pounds was placed in bin A, shown in figure 

 1 as pile 2, to be used in comparing the behavior of freshly picked 

 cotton without a preliminary loft chymg with cotton that had 

 been allowed a week in which to dry out. The second lot of 

 cotton was left without tramping and made a pile of an average 

 depth of 4.5 feet, having been so placed as to occupy the same nmn- 

 ber of square feet of floor space as pile 1. This pile of cotton had a 

 density per cubic foot of 10.1 pounds and represented the pickings 

 of October 2 which had been left out in the warm sun throughout 

 the day and then placed in the bin in the evening directly after being 



[Cir. 123] 



« soft » 



Fig. 1.— Floor plan of storage house, showing 

 the size and location of bins and the space 

 occupied by the cotton under observation. 



