364 COTTON 



Cobb's list of qualities is good. Except for two omissions 

 it seems practically to cover what a spinner is looking for. 



(1) Colour is important in many cases. There are 

 occasionally sold articles of wear in which the dead white 

 of American Upland or the pearly white of Abassi 

 are required; there are others which make their market 

 by their natural brown; but, as a rule, the value of colour 

 to a spinner is that his customers consider it an index 

 of quality; if he changes the colour or shade of his cotton 

 his customers are suspicious that the quality of the yarn 

 has also been changed. I think, also, that to cotton 

 growers colour may very probably be of great value as 

 an index of purity or of trueness to type. 



(2) Amount of trash and waste. This is of the first 

 importance commercially. Mr. Cob'b says that the mill 

 experiments with cottons of the various official standards 

 show visible waste, varying from 4 per cent, in Middling 

 Fair to about n per cent, in Good Ordinary. If this be 

 confirmed by the fuller report, which is promised later, 

 it shows the question of waste to be an even more 

 important one to the general bulk of spinners than I 

 should have expected. I know its great importance to 

 fine spinners. But on the figures given it means that if 

 Middling Fair is worth 8d. per Ib. containing 4 per cent, of 

 waste, then Good Ordinary will co<st the spinner as much 

 if he pays 7'42d. for it. Of course, in addition, the yarn 

 made from the poorer cotton will still be poorer, even 

 when this extra percentage of waste has been removed. 

 Mr. Cobb speaks only of visible waste. Invisible waste, 

 which may consist of damp, whether natural or fraudulent, 

 or of dust, is equally important. I may mention a new 

 cotton I once tried. It was attractive in appearance, but 

 the fibres broke up into dust to such an extent that it 

 was almost impossible to make a yarn at all, and quite 

 impossible to make a yarn of the same counts, i.e., of 

 the same thickness, as usual. 



This question of waste is one for scientific breeders. 

 Waste may be trash, due to the leaf or to the shape of 

 the boll. Waste may be immature fibres, due to the 

 fibre formation on the seed, which, I am told, is an 

 inherited quality. There may be other inherited causes. 



