II 
COTTON ONCE GREW ON TREES 
I SN'T IT ODD that cotton once grew on trees! 
We are so used to cotton as a field plant that grows 
only a few feet tall and dies in the autumn that we never 
think of it as growing in any other way. As it grew in 
the beginning, however, it was a far different sort of plant. 
Cotton got its start in the tropics. There it knew no 
frosts in the fall of the year and so did not die. It grew 
right along, season after season, and developed into a tree 
about as large as a peach tree. If cotton-picking had been 
popular in those days, as it is now, people would have 
had to go up stepladders to gather the crop. 
When men learned how to use the fiber of the cotton 
tree for making cloth, they began to plant it in their fields. 
They found that they could get better results by planting 
it fresh every year. They found, in fact, that countries 
far enough north to know frosts grew the best cotton 
crops. The southern part of the United States surpassed 
all other regions. Men came to plant those crops year 
by year. They forgot entirely that cotton in its native 
state was a tree growing in warm climates. 
When the United States came to rule over Hawaii, it 
planted cotton there. This cotton did not die out in the 
autumn. Thus attention was called to the almost for¬ 
gotten fact that the cotton plant is naturally a tree. 
Cotton plants were grown to be four or five years old 
in Hawaii and yielded well. Experiments were tried to 
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