10 WILD AND CULTIVATED COTTONS 



material) come from the fruit of the plants in question, while the 

 Hareaoarita (circa 650 A.D.) twice speaks of the cotton (tula) from 

 the pods of the sdlmali (e.g., Semul, Bombax malabaricum) tree.' 



In the Institutes of Manu injunctions exist that regulate the 

 operations of the washermen and of the weavers ; these all point to 

 a social organisation and industrial attainment in which a knowledge 

 of cotton is essential, but it is taken for granted rather than ex- 

 pounded or justified. All this might of course argue antiquity, 

 as it certainly does for the axis of spinning and weaving, but the 

 word kdrpdsi may have existed for centuries with a generic rather 

 than a specific signification. 



Classic Similarly, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to determine 



le8 ' the earliest certain references to cotton in the Persian, Arabic and 

 European classics. It is fairly clear that qutn (katdn or kutun), its 

 Arabic name, from which we have derived the English word ' cotton,' 

 originally denoted flax, not cotton. So also in Greek karpasos, often 

 rendered ' cotton,' had the still earlier meaning of flax, or simply of a 

 fine textile. The word linon (flax) was itself at one time used to 

 denote cotton, and to-day it is customary to speak of the cotton floss 

 as being ' lint.' With all these and many other such contradictions 

 it is not difficult to concur with Yates (' Textrinum Antiquorum ') that 

 the poets assumed a licence in the use of the word carbasus. That 

 being so, the greatest possible caution is necessary. But there would 

 appear to be no doubt that cotton textiles had been carried to 

 Europe, and were regularly traded in, long before any definite 

 knowledge existed regarding the plant or the fibre of which they 

 were made. In fact the Greeks were first acquainted with the cotton 

 plant through the group of explorers who accompanied Alexander 

 the Great and his immediate successors in India. 



Greek dia- Herodotus (450 B.C.), it is true, speaks of India having wild trees 



covenes. ^^ b ea r fl eeceg (^ n ' a ) as their fruits. But right down to the middle of 



the eighteenth century the wool-bearing trees were divided into those 



with spinose and those with smooth stems. The former were the 



silk-cotton trees, of which Bombax malabaricum the Sdlmali of the 



Sanskrit authors may be given as the type, while under the latter 



many of the early botanical writers included kapok Eriodendron 



Quilting anfractuosum. A very large percentage of the writers of the period 



cottons. indicated speak of cotton being used for quilts and mattresses, but 



are silent regarding its being spun and woven. 



Ktesias would appear to have been the first European who 



