REMARKS ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OP COTTON. 171 
before extensive flocks were purchased and attempted to be 
reared in this country. These, and a hundred other facts., show 
how important is the study of the natural history of the 
materials which are employed in our national industry. 
What is true of the production of the raw materials of our 
manufactures, is also true of the nature of the material ; just in 
proportion as the workman is acquainted with the properties 
of his tools, and the materials on which he works, will he 
be enabled to improve his manufacture and increase the 
comforts of the community for which he labours. The great ad- 
vances in our manufacturing- industry, and the improvement of 
the articles manufactured, have not arisen so much from demand 
on the part of the public, as from the intelligent investigation 
of the properties of the raw materials of our manufactures, and 
their relations to the great physical forces of nature which man 
employs as his servants in the huge workshop of the world. It is, 
then, to the natural history of the cotton-plant and the pro- 
perties of cotton that I wish more particularly to draw attention 
in this paper. 
We have no knowledge of the precise time at which cotton 
began to be used by mankind ; but there can be no doubt of 
its having been employed by the Hindoos earlier than any other 
race of men. The Jews were not at all, or only incidentally, 
acquainted with cotton. The cotton-plant grew wild in ancient 
Egypt, and may have been used occasionally for the manufac- 
ture of exceptional articles of general use or clothing ; but the 
cloth in which they wrapped then- mummies, and which they 
wore as clothing, was made from flax. We are told by Herodotus 
that the mummy-cloth of Egypt was made of the Byssus, and 
commentators down to the beginning of the present century 
regarded the Byssus as the production of the cotton-plant. It 
was left for Mr. Bauer, the distinguished natural-history artist 
and microscopic observer, at the suggestion of Mr. James 
Thomson, of Manchester, to discover that the mummy-cloth of 
Egypt was composed of linen, and not of cotton fibres. We are 
thus driven to the conclusion that Hindostan is not only the native 
country of the cotton-plant, but that it is the country in which 
its manufacture was invented and developed. Dr. Boyle tells us, 
in his “ History of the Use of Cotton in India,” that its manu- 
factured products, and even the process of starching it, are 
referred to in the Institutes of Menu, at as early a period as 
800 years B.C. It is an interesting fact for us to know and 
dwell upon, at the present moment, that India is the true home 
of the cotton-plant, and the parent of its manufacture. 
Without entering further upon the introduction of cotton 
fabrics and the cotton manufacture into Europe, let us 
inquire into the nature of the fibre that has thus found its way 
