The Mena weekly star., 1897-11-10
| 500 bales at a time. The lighters

out much trouble. The crew of these lighters receive less pay than the reg ular longshoremen, but their labor is less onerous and wearying. The der riclSs do most of the lifting, while the men merely guide the swinging bales as they shoot up in the air and land on the deck of the lighter
 Each compressed bale. of cotton weighs about 500 pounds. and uncom- pressed nearly third less. Sea Is- land cotton is generally received here uncvmpressed, for there is prevailing notion abroad that it is injured by the process. Nevertheless, greater care is exercised in handling the Sea Island than the ordinary varieties There has been considerable discussion in late years about improving our meth ods of baling. Before the bales reach their final destination there is large percentage of loss to be deducted through insufficient covering of the cotton, and this has prejudiced for elgn dealers against handling Ameri- can cotton except when forced to-
 Cotton picking is done almost entire iy by hand. Large sums of money have been invested in cotton picking machines and several have been pu t in the fields to do the work of negro laborers;. but so far the problem of re- ducing this work to machinery has not yet been solved. The expense of pick ing is the heaviest item Tn handling the crop. 1t costs between fifty and sixty million dollars to harvest the crop annually. A negro picker in slave days averaged 100 pounds of cotton per day; but this average is nearly doubled by the modern employees. who receive from 35 cents to 50 cents per 100 pounds in various states of the south.
 When picked, the cotton is carted to the gin house, where it is weighed and piled away. The ginning process is nearly the same as that introd uced by old Eli Whitney years ago, and there IS no apparent need for any inn provement. The fiber passes through $ series of circular saws or rollers which tear the seed from the fiber and blow them out into two separate com par tmeDts. Formerly all this cotton seed was practically wasted; but now it adds about $50, 1000, GOO annually to the resources of the south. To every bale of 500 pounds there are generally 800 pounds of seed, and ton of this seed yields about thirty-five gallons of oil, valued at forty to fifty cents per gallon. This part of the industry has sprung into existan ce only in the past ten years: but it is already an enor- nous business
 The cotton belt of the south has been greatly extended since slave d avs, Then 1t was considered to be only a narrow belt through Georgia the Carolinas and Virginia; but it now measures about GOO, 900 square miles. All of 1t is not by any means cultivat- ed with cotton. Probably not more than 20, ,000, ,00D acres are cultivated with cotton in any one ye ar, and some years it has run less than half this number of acres. The average yield of this immense territory is between 6, ,0O0, 900 and 9,U00, GOO bales. Texas leads all the other states by nearly one-half, with Georgia and Mississippi following in order With an average crop of s, GOO, ,O00 bales we lead all other countries by far in cotton growing. India is second with about 5000, 900 to 4,000, 900 bales. and China and Egy pt come next in order with less than g. 900 GOO bales each. The cotton area in these other countries is being extend ed, however, and while the south will always control the markets of the world, she will suffer more or less from foreign competition. We pro- duce the best cotton in the world, and in no parts of the globe can our fa- nous Sea Island cotton be duplicated.
 There have been many agencies at work to improve the cotton crop as we'll as to utilize the by-products; but so far the only real advance has been made through the slow D rocess of superior cultivation and the i'm prove ment of the plants by careful selection. Recently the newspapers gave curren- cy to story of marvellous cotton
 plant introduced from Africa, which promised to revolutionize the cotton industry of the world in a year or two. This new cotton plant was described as towering to the height of twenty feet, and producing great mass of downy balls that would increase the acreage enormously But R. J. Red- ding, director of the Georgia Experi- ment Station, discounts the wonder ful claims of the new variety, and adds: "The claim that the variety of cotton belongs to different genus cannot for moment be allowed. It is not even of new species. but simply variety of Gosspyium herbaceum, and very probably of local (domestic) origin"
 Nevertheless, the cotton plant has been greatly improved in the last half century through cultivation and selec- tion. Fifty years ago the old ''peeler' variety of cotton was used entirely by the Southern nlanterS This was a