4 BULLETIN 311, U. S. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 
As it was about trie middle of January when these corrections were 
made it was not until after that time that the best grades of cotton 
were produced at the gins. Under ordinary conditions it is usual to 
expect the best grades to be made from the first cotton picked, but 
due to these conditions at the gins the higher grades were made from 
that part of the crop which was picked in the middle of the season. 
This accounts for the relative^ few bales of Fancy found in the crop. 
(See Tables I, II, and III, pp. 9 and 10.) 
In the season of 1914 the Tempe and Mesa gins were equipped 
with cleaners and feeders which, when the cotton was dry, beat a 
great deal of the leaf out of the cotton before it went into the gin 
stand. The manager of the Tempe gin, rinding it essential to have 
the cotton dry in order to do proper ginning and also to lessen the 
wear on the walrus-hide rollers, arranged a system by which the seed 
cotton, when damp, was drawn by suction from the wagon, dropped 
through the center flue of the storehouse, a distance of about 40 
feet, then was conveyed through the air-blast pipes for approximately 
40 feet, returned to the seed house, and then conveyed to the gin 
stands. This process dried the lint considerably and allowed the 
cleaners to knock the leaf out of the cotton, .thereby improving its 
grade. 
SAMPLING COTTON AT THE GIN STANDS. 
In order to secure a thoroughly representative sample of the 
Arizona-Egyptian cotton which would show the average quality of 
the cotton in the bale, the following method of sampling at the gin 
stands was inaugurated: 
The workman whose duty it was to gather the cotton from the gin 
stands and convey it to the press box was instructed to take a handful 
of lint cotton from each gin stand when a wagonload of seed cotton 
was started through the gin, then to take another when the seed 
cotton was about half ginned, and a third when the ginning of the bale 
was nearly completed. It will be seen that by this method samples 
were secured which represented the cotton in different parts of the 
bale. In the case of gins operating 10-roller gin stands the taking 
of samples from each gin stand, at the beginning, middle, and com- 
pletion, will give samples- from 30 parts of the bale. The amount of 
cotton thus taken from the bale will weigh about 1 pound, and will 
be of sufficient size to split into types, on which sales may be made, 
and will do away with the practice of cutting the bagging at each 
sampling. Such cutting of the bagging not only wastes as much 
cotton as is taken out at the gins for the sample, but opens a way for 
further waste and damage, and also causes greater danger of fire. 
The effect of cutting the bagging of a bale several times for sampling 
purposes is shown by Plate I, figure 2, which represents an Arizona- 
Egyptian bale as it arrived in Liverpool. 
