184 USEFUL FIBER PLANTS OF THE WORLD. 



are necessary to keep clown •weeds, and the plants are thinned until only two of the 

 strongest plants remain in the stand. Each hoeing is followed by the plow, which 

 throws the earth around the stalk. The particular practice varies greatly, however, 

 in different sections, though the same object is always kept in view to keep the soil 

 free from weeds and the plants growing. 



The first bolls open June 15 in southern Texas, and September 15 in north Arkansas. 

 Picking commences in the two sections July 10 and October 1, respectively, and may 

 continue until the middle of December. 



Cotton is picked by hand, notwithstanding that considerable skill and capital have 

 been expended in the efforts to produce a machine cotton picker. It can not be said 

 that any of these machines have been successful, as they gather limbs, leaves, and 

 hulls, necessitating the passing of the whole through a separator. As high as 333 

 pounds of cotton have been picked per day by one man, though it is probable that 100 

 pounds is nearer the day's work of the average plantation laborer. The picking of 

 the crop of 1891 was estimated to have cost $60,000,000. | Harry Hammond.) 



Ginning Cottons. — The devices for separating the lint from the seed are of two 

 (lasses. The first class is known as roller gins, the other as saw gins. The roller 

 gin is the most ancient. It was used from the earliest times by the Hindoos. In its 

 simplest form it consists of a flat stone, on which the seed cotton was placed, and a 

 wooden roller, moved by the foot, was employed to press the seed out. To this day 

 two small rollers, a foot long, one of wood and the other of iron, geared to move in 

 opposite directions and turned by hand, are used in India to separate the seed from 

 the fiber. The task is 5 pounds of clean cotton a day, and the Woman who performs 

 it receives a daily wage of 5 cents. In Sicily, also, two grooved cylinders, turned 

 by hand, are still used to pinch out the seed. In the Amoy district of China cotton 

 is said to be cleaned by means of a heavy wooden bow suspended from a bamboo 

 frame on the shoulders of the operator, who feeds the cotton along a board with his 

 right hand, and with his left strikes it with the string of his bow, cleaning from 50 

 to 100 pounds a day, at a wage of 10 cents. The combination of the roller and the bow- 

 string beater may be observed in certain of the modern improved roller gins used for 

 cleaning the long-staple Sea Island cotton. The seed cotton is fed on a table to a 

 leather roller (preferably walrus hide), the roughness of which engages the fiber, 

 while a steel plate in close juxtaposition to the roller prevents the passage of the 

 seed and a rapidly vibrating blade knocks them out. The cleaned seed fall through 

 interstices in the table, and the lint is delivered on the farther side of the roller. 

 Only cotton with naked seed has been successfully ginned in this way, the down on 

 ordinary upland seed causing them when agitated to adhere to each other and pre- 

 vents them from falling through the openings in the table. The construction of the 

 roller gin has undoubtedly been greatly improved in recent times, especially as 

 regards the ease with which it is worked and the quantity of cotton it cleans ; but it 

 is doubtful if the quality of the product is any better than it was in those ancient 

 days Avhen the Hindoos extracted with it the delicate fibers with which they made 

 the wonderful tissues called the "woven wind." The saw gin, which works on 

 another principle, is the machine which, in its improvements and modifications, has 

 separated seed from fiber almost exclusively for a hundred years of American cotton 

 growing. The seed cotton is held in a box, one side of which is a grate of steel bars 

 or ribs. Through the intervals of the grate a number of thin steel disks notched on 

 the edge and miscalled saws rotate rapidly. • The notches or teeth of the saws 

 engage the liber and pull it from the seed. The seed as they are cleaned fall to the 

 floor through a slit below the ribs. Behind the cylinder holding the saws is another 

 and a larger cylinder (the brush) filled with bristles in contact with the saws. 

 Both cylinders rotate in the same direction. The brush sweeps from the saws the 

 fibers they have detached, and the draft created by the rapid revolutions of the two 

 cylinders blows the lint out to a distance of 20 to 60 feet from the end of the gin, 

 opposite to the one into which the seed cotton is fed. The defects of both methods 

 of ginning are much the same. They fail to (dean the lint thoroughly of foreign 



