THE COTTON PLANT 95 
the delicacy of the initial process on which all this pro- 
duction depends, namely, spinning, and remembering 
that there are nearly 60,000,000 spindles spinning cotton 
in Great Britain alone, that the produce of a single plant 
of Egyptian cotton is worth less than a farthing, and 
that the weight of a cotton hair is of the order of 0,004 
milligrams, 
We have mentioned that this country specialises on 
fine spinning, averaging about 4os counts, at the rate 
of 383 lb. per spindle per annum. In effecting this 
production the spindle in question would put about 
1100 million twists into the length of yarn produced, 
and this length would exceed 7oo miles. Ordinary 
40s sewing cotton consists of six such strands of yarn. 
But spinning js carried on commercially to counts as 
fine as 300s and over, for special purposes ; one mile of 
such yarn weighs three grams, and has received about 
four million twists. 
These mechanical processes whereby the tangled epi- 
dermal hairs of the cotton-seed are finally arranged in 
regular sequence, all straight and parallel, with as few 
as twenty hairs in the cross section, date back in their 
conception to more thanacentury ago. Although many 
improvements and refinements have been introduced 
into the machinery, and although the speed of produc- 
tion has been enormously increased, there have been 
no further inventions of primary importance for over 
sixty years. 
The basis-mechanism of the whole machinery is the 
“ drafting-roller ’’ patented by Lewis Paul and John 
Wyatt in 1738. The cotton is fed into the nip of one 
pair of rollers, and shortly after emerging from this nip 
