COTTON 71 
Georgia ie at least $8,000,000 a year for 
commercial nitrogen, when a proper system of 
rotation, including leguminous crops, would abun- 
dantly supply the soil with this ingredient. 
And this is Leak No. 2 which we can stop and 
thereby transfer millions to the credit side of 
King Cotton’s ledger. 
THE BARBAROUS SAW GIN DESTROYS MILLIONS IN 
COTTON VALUES 
There has been no noteworthy improvement in 
the cotton gin since the new-born idea was first 
worked out by Eli Whitney; and our baling methods 
are also notoriously inefficient. “It is contended,’’ 
says Mr. Thomas P. Grasty, “that the saw gin 
actually wastes or destroys over 6 per cent. of all the 
cotton raised in the Southern States—meaning the 
destruction each year of nearly $40,000,000 worth 
of property belonging to the farmers of the South.” 
By its rough handling it is also asserted by the 
highest authorities, that the saw gin destroys over 
40 per cent. of the initial strength of the cotton 
fiber. No wonder one of our American cotton 
specialists is on record as declaring cotton to be 
“the most barbarously handled commercial prod- 
uct in the world.”’ Besides the waste, the de- 
struction of fiber, and the lack of uniformity in 
size of bales, gins at present are able to pack 
cotton at the average density of only fourteen 
pounds per cubic foot. Every bale not sold to 
local mills, therefore, must be sent to some cotton 
compress and the size reduced two-thirds before 
it can be exported. 
A fortune awaits the man who will invent a 
compress requiring small horse power, so that the 
