MISCELLANEOUS AGRICULTURAL PEODUCTS. 



COTTON. 



COTTON is one of the most valuable agricultural products of the country, and has for 

 many years been one of its principal exports; in fact, the plant which will supply the 

 material for one of our leading industries, as well as for the clothing of all nations of 

 the globe, should claim a rank second to none in the vegetable kingdom, except it be that which 

 supplies the necessary sustenance of life to the human family in the form of food. It is a plant 

 indigenous to all inter-tropical regions, and can be cultivated with success in no other. Its culture 

 antedates the commencement of the Christian era, the first mention of it of which we have any 

 record being by Herodotus, about 450 B. C. He says of it, &quot; There is a plant in India which 

 produces wool finer and better than that of sheep, of which the Indians make their clothes. &quot; 

 Pliny, late in the first century, says, &quot; There grows a shrub called Gossypium or Xylon, in 

 Upper Egypt, producing a stuff from which the white garments of the priests are made.&quot; In 

 the Chinese records, no mention is made of cotton until about two hundred years before the 

 Christian era, from which time to the sixth century cotton cloth was regarded as something 

 exceedingly rare and precious, and was paid in tribute, or offered in presents to the emperors ; 

 it is also recorded, as an incident of importance of the Emperor Ou-ti, who ascended the 

 throne in 502, that he had a robe of cotton. 



Columbus found cotton in the possession of the natives of Hispaniola, and the plant was 

 found growing wild in the Mississippi valley and Texas by the early explorers of the country. 

 It was first cultivated by the early settlers as an ornamental garden plant, and it was not until 

 1739, according to reliable authority, that it was first exported, this exportation consisting 

 of but one bag of the product, from Savannah, Ga. It is an incident of record, that in the 

 year 1784, an American ship having on board eight bags of cotton, bound for Liverpool, was 

 seized on the ground that so much cotton could not have been produced in the United States! 

 In the conquest of Mexico, in 1519, it is stated that Cortes received garments of cotton as 

 presents from the natives of Yucatan, as well as cotton cloths for coverings to his huts. 

 Specimens of cotton fabrics have also been taken from the ancient Peruvian tombs. In the 

 year 1785 the cultivation of the short-staple cotton was commenced in the United States, and 

 in ten years from that period one million pounds were exported from Charleston, South 

 Carolina. Since that time the immense increase in this product in the Southern States, and 

 the revenue brought to that section from its exportation (the latter amounting to a hundred 

 and fifty millions of dollars annually), has been mainly due to inventions of improved 

 machinery, the principal of which was the saw cotton gin, a machine for separating the cotton 

 from the seeds, which adhere to the fiber quite tenaciously, and which was invented by Mr. 

 Eli &quot;Whitney, of Massachusetts, in 1793. Although it brought the inventor but small profit, 

 and a vast amount of troublesome litigation, this invention resulted in great benefit to the 

 human race, by immensely increasing the cotton industry of the whole world. Previous to 

 this invention, the separating of the cotton seed from the fiber was mainly performed by 

 hand, being a slow and expensive process. Mr. &quot;Whitney s machine cleaned a thousand 

 pounds in the same time that one pound could be cleaned by hand, and consequently very soon 

 caused a revolution in the cultivation and manufacture of the cotton product. 



The United States stands first among the countries of the world in the amount and value 

 of its cotton products, British India ranking next, but the fiber is inferior to that of this 



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