INFLUENCE OF INVENTIONS ON CIVILIZATION. 481 



ning the leather of which the harness is made. Recently planting or 

 drilling machines for planting the seed have come into use, and arti- 

 ficial fertilizers — the product of the chemist's art — and the mechanism 

 for distributing it over the ground. Even after the plant has begun 

 to grow and before it is ripe, invention must often be called into 

 play to protect it from the ravages of insects, and not a few devices, 

 mechanical or chemical, have been called into existence for this 

 purpose. 



The ripe cotton-balls are still picked by hand, though inventors are 

 busy with the problem of picking it by machinery. It is gathered 

 into baskets or bags, themselves inventions, to be transported by a 

 cart, another invention, to the gin-house, still another invention, where 

 it comes under the operation of the gin to separate the cotton from 

 the cotton-seed. 



"Would you like to know what the cotton-gin has done toward mak- 

 ing cotton cheap, toward enabling enough to be sold for two cents to 

 make a yard of cloth ? An acre of ground is expected to produce at 

 least one bale of cotton, which weighs four hundred pounds or over. 

 Before the cotton-gin was invented, a man could pick about four 

 pounds and a half of cotton from the seed in a day ; bo that it took a 

 man about ninety days to sej^arate the cotton which he could raise on 

 an acre from the seed. 



Whitney invented the cotton-gin, and with it a man could separate 

 seventy pounds. In other words, he could do the work in six days 

 which before took him ninety days. The invention was made less 

 than a hundred years ago, but inventors have been busy with it ever 

 since, improving it year by year, and now it turns out four thousand 

 pounds a day ! In other words, a single machine will do the work of 

 about a thousand men. 



As soon as the cotton is through the gin it must be pressed into 

 bales, for the cotton is a light, bulky article which can not be trans- 

 ported without confinement and a great reduction of bulk. So another 

 invention is required, the cotton-press. Some of these presses are 

 wonderfvd machines. They embrace a steam-engine, a force-pump, and 

 a hydraulic or hydrostatic press, and give a pressure of 4,000 pounds to 

 the square inch. 



The cotton-bale is surrounded by a coarse cloth called gunny-cloth, 

 itself the product of another line of inventions, including the arts of 

 spinning and weaving, and made by special machinery. The bale must 

 also be hooped with iron hoops, involving again the inventions per- 

 taining to the manufacture of iron, but in addition the machinery for 

 rolling it into thin and narrow strips, and I think this embraces the 

 art of rolling iron into round bars and drawing it into wire. 



These hoops must at last be fastened around the bales, and that 

 has called for the invention of peculiar fastenings called cotton-bale ties. 



At length, through all these inventions, we have the cotton ready 

 Toi,. xxvni. — 31 



