“In the Island of Tylos, which is in the Arabian Gulf,[30] the wool-bearing trees, which grow there abundantly, have leaves like the vine, but smaller. They bear no fruit, but the pod containing the wool is about the size of a spring apple (“μηλον”), whilst it is unripe and closed, but when it is ripe it opens: the wool is then gathered from it, and woven into cloths of various qualities—some inferior, but others of great value.”
[30] Theophrastus is in error in placing Tylos in the Arabian Gulf (which we now call the Red Sea); it was in the Persian Gulf, and is now known as Bahrsin. The ancients, however, gave to the whole of the sea between the east coast of Africa, north of Mogador, and the west shores of India the name of the “Erythræan Sea,” from King Erythros, of whom nothing more is known than the name, which, in Greek, signifies “red.” From this casual meaning of the word it came to be believed that the water of this sea differed in colour from that of others, and that it was consequently more difficult to navigate.
This description by Theophrastus is remarkably correct as applied to the herbaceous variety of the cotton-plant, from which the chief supply of cotton for spinning and weaving into cloth has always been obtained. In its mode of growth—branched, spreading, and flexible—it may well be likened to the dog-rose; and its palmate leaves bear a close resemblance to those of the black mulberry, which differ little from the leaves of some varieties of the vine. The remark relative to the mode of cultivation is also exactly applicable to the cotton-plant, which is set in rows about four feet asunder, and the plants about two feet apart, so that a field of it resembles a vineyard when seen from a distance.
Pomponius Mela, the author next in order of time, also writes in his account of India[31] of the “trees that produce wool used by the natives for clothing.”
[31] De Situ Orbis, lib. iii. cap. 7.
Then comes Pliny, who, incompetent and worthless as a naturalist, though admirable as a writer, obscured this subject, as he did many others. In his ‘Natural History’[32] he mentions cotton in four different paragraphs, and in every one of them inaccurately. He confuses cotton with flax, and the fabrics woven of it with linen, and treats of silk as a downy substance scraped from the leaves of trees. And, in transcribing, or translating, the passage from Theophrastus relating to the “wool-bearing trees,” he distorts the author’s words, and states that “these trees bear gourds the size of a quince, which burst when ripe, and display balls of wool out of which the inhabitants make cloths like valuable linen.” Pliny therefore seems to have been the author of the “gourd” portion of the story which afterwards obtained currency in Western Europe.
[32] ‘Naturalis Historia,’ A.D. 77.
I shall quote one more ancient mention of the “fleece-bearing plant,” because the author of it gives a more exact description than any previous writer of that portion of it from which the wool is taken.
Julius Pollux, who wrote about a hundred years later than Pliny, says in his ‘Onomasticon’:—
“There are also Byssina and Byssus, a kind of flax. But among the Indians a sort of wool is obtained from a tree. The cloth made from this wool may be compared with linen, except that it is thicker. The tree produces a fruit most nearly resembling a walnut, but three-cleft. After the outer covering, which is like a walnut, has divided and become dry, the substance resembling wool is extracted, and is used in the manufacture of cloth.”