180 COTTON CULTURE. 



CHAPTER IX. 



COTTON SEED, COTTON SEED OIL, COTTON SEED CAKE. 



BY J. K. SYPHER, ESQ. 



To every bale of cotton-lint, weighing 400 pounds, 

 there are produced about 1400 pounds of seed. Though 

 for many years no good use was made of the cotton seed 

 that accumulated in great heaps about the gin-houses, it 

 has long been known that the kernel of the seed is rich in 

 oil. As early as 1826, a gentleman in the State of Vir- 

 ginia constructed a small machine by which he was ena- 

 bled to express from crushed cotton seed a dark red oil, 

 which, when burned in a common lard oil lamp, gave a 

 fair light. No practical use was made of this discovery, 

 and for many years the facts thus developed were known 

 only to a few friends of the original experimenter. When, 

 however, the extensive and successful production of cot- 

 ton made cotton goods so very cheap that the production 

 of flax, and, consequently, the supply of flax seed greatly 

 fell away, the proprietors of linseed oil mills began to 

 look about in search of some substitute upon which to 

 employ their crushers and presses. " Pea-nuts," " castor 

 beans," cotton seed, and many other articles, were tested. 



These experimenters experienced difficulties which me- 

 chanical genius subsequently overcame. When the seed 

 of Upland cotton comes from the gin, it is covered with a 

 thick coat of short lint, which adheres strongly to the dry, 

 hard pericarp that surrounds the kernel, or meat, in the 

 seed. In the absence of any contrivance by which the 

 lint-coating and pericarp could be removed, it was neces- 

 sary to grind or crush the seed in an ordinary burr- 

 stone, or iron mill, and to put the whole mass into the 

 boxes of the press. The oil was easily forced from the 

 broken seed, but the intermatting lint immediately absorb- 

 ed the greater portion of it. In the experiments made 



