Fig. 8.—Cotton fibers magnified.
The cotton seeds are taken from the fiber. After the pickers have gone up and down the long rows and filled their bags or baskets, they empty the cotton into wagons which carry it to the gin house, where the seeds are separated from the fibers and the brown pieces of the pod are blown away as it is separated and cleaned. Long ago in India and other countries, cotton was ginned by hand. What a long tedious process, for only one pound could be separated by a person in a day. The picture (Fig. 9) shows a little girl at school trying to gin some cotton with a little ginning machine which she has made at school. While George Washington was President of the United States, a man named Eli Whitney invented a machine, called the saw gin, for separating cotton fibers from the seed. This invention has saved much time. To-day cotton is all ginned by machinery; and so great quantities can be separated in a day. The machine works in such a way that the cotton fibers are pulled away from the seeds, and the seeds are kept separate for other purposes.
The cotton seeds are used, too. Some of the seeds are kept for planting, just as you keep corn and oats on your farm; and others are pressed. Cottonseed oil comes from the seeds when pressed, and is very useful for many purposes, such as salad oil, soaps, cooking fats, and used for cattle feed. The seed is covered with a fuzz which is first removed and used for lint. Then the hulls are removed, and the dry cake which is left, after the oil has been extracted, is also used for feeding the cattle. Isn't cotton a very valuable plant? How poor we should be without it, for silk and wool and linen cost so much more. Cotton is the cheap, useful fiber.
Courtesy of Speyer School, New York.
Fig. 9.—A Pleasant Valley girl trying to gin some cotton with a little ginning machine which she has made at school.
Fig. 10.—Bales of cotton on a steamboat dock ready for shipping.