The cotton plant belongs to the Mallow Family, along with the hollyhock, hibiscus, althea, okra and the little weed we call "cheeses." The flowers plainly proclaim the relationship of these cousins. The trumpet-like corolla has a belt of stamens, all grown together by the fleshiness of their filaments that form a cylinder enclosing the pistils. The abutilon, or flowering maple, grown indoors, illustrates well this mallow type of flower. The fruit is a pod, with several compartments containing seeds. In the cotton plant, the seeds are provided with long hairs, as a milkweed seed is. Nature evidently intended these hairs to aid in scattering the seed. The pod bursts open when ripe, and the hairy mass is pushed out by its own expansion. The seeds go wherever the "wool" goes.
In growing cotton, the planting day waits until danger of frost is about past, and yet the planter must beware the early fall frosts that might get his cotton at the other end of the season. Six months of growing weather, warm, with showers enough and plenty of sunshine, the cotton plant requires to do its best.
The seed is put into the ground, in a continuous row, like peas, though single plants two feet apart is the ideal "stand" on good land. The little plants come up slowly, and pretty feeble they are, crowding each other for standing room. When they are a few inches high the strongest begin to assert themselves, and the "choppers" come in with hoes to thin the plants, and destroy, with other weeds, all plants but the few that are chosen to make the crop.
Next comes the cultivator, with the important duty of stirring the surface soil, thus killing the young weeds and grass. Unhappily, the ignorant cotton-grower goes too deep and too close with his one-horse plow, which cuts off side roots, and so gives the plant a great backset. It is the same plow he used in the preparation of the field for the seed, and is utterly unfit for the tilling of a growing crop. Besides he must make two trips to do a single row.
It is a pathetic sight to see farmers damaging their crop with labor that is so hard, when a tool suited to the job would save half the effort and double the yield of the land.
Every week or ten days the cultivation of the rows is needed to check the weeds and grass, and to keep the soil moisture from being lost by evapo ration. The roots are gathering their food from the soil moisture, and need all they can get.
Rains by night and hot sunshine by day bring the cotton plant up fast, send out side branches, heavy with leaves, and on these branches the buds.
The flowers open, white or yellowish, and close at nightfall. The second day they open and be come reddish. On the third day the blossoms fall, leaving behind the little pointed bolls with the green calyx to protect each. Gradually the boll grows until it reaches the size of a hen's egg. Then it cracks along three division lines, showing white fibres that hide the seed. In a little while the picker comes to pull the fibrous mass out of the pod, and the story is ended.
Not all of the bolls ripen together on a plant. Indeed, it would be a simple job to invent har vesters for cotton as for corn. But the bolls ripen gradually through a period of three months. The colored race loves the cotton, and furnishes the pickers. Families leave the cities and swarm to the fields, singing the songs of their people, revel ling in the freedom and the beauty of the country, while they work (not too hard!) and earn money against the coming of winter. The picking costs two cents per pound of lint. The farmers of the South paid out $75,000,000 for the picking of the cotton crop of 1905! The pickers' bags are weighed as they are emp tied, and the seed cotton goes by the wagon load to the gin.
The cotton gin is the machine that separates seeds from lint. Until 1792, when Eli Whitney invented this wonderful machine, the seeds had to be picked by hand out of the fibre — a toil some, slow process. The gin revolutionized the whole cotton industry of the world. Inventions had just supplied machinery to take the place of hands in the spinning and weaving of cloth. The gin made it possible for the cotton-growers to supply the increased demand for lint. It bridged a chasm about which men had been hopeless.
The gin to-day is an improved machine, com pared with Whitney's. But it does the work on the same principle. The freed lint is compressed into bales that may be marketed at once, or kept for sale later.
The best fibre is the longest and finest and strongest one. Sea Island cotton has highest rank. Its fibre averages 1.6r inches in length, and is fine and silky. A pound of these fibres could be spun into a thread 16o miles long! Un fortunately, this variety grows only on the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and the islands of that region. So the amount produced makes little impression upon the market.