Illustration: COTTON (‡ PLANT).
Cotton consists of the fine long hairs which grow from the seeds of
several varieties of _Gossypium_, a plant belonging to the natural
order of _Malvaceæ_. These hairs are so long and numerous that they
completely fill the pod or seed vessel; they are very delicate, and
of the same size throughout, and but seldom jointed, they are each
separate from the other.
The cotton plant is chiefly cultivated in America and India. In
India, and some of the islands in the Indian Ocean, cotton has
been cultivated, spun, and woven into textures from time immemorial.
Cotton fabrics were in use in Mexico before its conquest by the
Spaniards, and have been used in China for many hundred years; its
chief source now is America, where more than two hundred times the
quantity is grown at present than was grown there half-a-century ago;
but the internal communication brought about by railways in India,
may, in all probability, revive the cultivation of cotton in that
country; the cost of conveyance from the interior having been one of
the greatest drawbacks to its exportation.
Cotton is not only cheaper than linen (which is woven from flax),
but has several advantages over it: it takes dyes much better, and
produces brighter colors; the improvements made in the machinery
for spinning and weaving cotton, have not only enabled us to match
the spinners and weavers of India, which, for a long time supplied
nearly the whole of Europe, but at the present time, cotton cloths of
English manufacture are exported to India for the purpose of clothing
the natives of that country.