[ 288 ] 

 CHAPTER XLL 



COTTON (GOSSYPIUM) . 



/COTTON as a fibre-crop will be separately dealt with 

 and the cultivation of the crop will be treated in a 

 future chapter. We will discuss here its oil yielding quality 

 only. Up to the time of the American \\ar of Inde- 

 pendence cotton-seed was regarded as a useless article. 

 In India, even now it is thrown away in many places as a 

 useless article; but in many places also the seed is given 

 to cattle, especially to milch-cows to increase the flow of 

 their milk. In the Nagpur Experimental Farm, 2 seers of 

 cotton-seed per diem are given to each bullock in place of 

 oil-cake. The extraction of oil is practically unkown in 

 India and in fact the Indian varieties of cotton yield very 

 little oil. Decorticated cotton-cake is considered the best oil- 

 cake both for feeding cattle and for fertilizing the soil. It is 

 almost as good as Bengal and N.-W. Provinces castor-cake 

 as a manure, containing 6 to 7 per cent, of N against 6 to 

 8 per cent., which is the proportion of N in castor-cake. 

 The ash of cotton-cake is particularly rich in phosphoric acid_, 

 potash and lime, the constituent of the ash being shown 

 below : 



Potash ... 3 5 '44 



P 2 O 5 ... ... 3 l6 



Lime ... 4'45 



MgO ... ... ... i5 6 7 



Soda ... ... ... o'Sio 



SO 3 ... 3'222 



Fe. ? O 3 and A1 2 O 3 ... i'75 



Cl ... '49 



co 2 ... ... 3-465 



Sand &c. ... ... 5^65 



TOO'OOO 



