Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/117

Rh climates so that the stiffening point would be several degrees lower. Lard was also prepared with this oil for the Israelites, whose religion does not permit the use of any product of the hog. The refined lard of to-day is made of refined packer's lard, pure dressed-beef fat, and pure refined cotton-seed oil. The consistence of the beef fat is overcome by the oil. Three fourths of the lard in use to-day contains from ten to twenty-five per cent of the oil, and nearly all of it is sold as oil-lard. It has been attacked by producers of hog lard, but investigations have shown that the new lard is quite as wholesome as the old.

Table oil often bears the brand of olive oil when it is really cotton-seed oil mixed with a small proportion of the olive. Sometimes the oil is taken to France and Italy and mixed there, but more often the mixture is made in this country. So closely is olive oil imitated, both as to taste and color, that only an expert knows the difference. In the earlier days of making cotton-seed oil the white oil brought a higher price than the yellow; but today the yellow oil is the more expensive. Cheaper processes of manufacture have lowered the price and encouraged the use of the yellow oil in making a substitute for butter.

Cotton oil ranks next to sperm oil and above lard oil for illuminating purposes, and it may be burned in any lamp used for either. Mixed with petroleum, it increases the freedom of burning; but this requires a change in the wick. As a lubricating oil cotton-seed is useless, because it is half way between the drying and the non-drying. For the same reason it can not be used for paints, for wood filling, or for leather dressing. It has some use as a substitute for vaseline and similar products. The oil enters into the production of laundry and fancy soaps and soaps for woolen mills. The American sardines, properly known as young shad and herring, are put up with this oil, and the use of it extends so far that nearly all the real sardines of Europe are now treated in the same way. The oil forms an emulsion in medicine and a substitute for cod-liver oil. On the market the crude oil is known as either prime, or off quality, or cooking. There are also the white summer, the yellow winter, and the white winter. All these, except the crude, bring an average of about fifty cents a gallon in the wholesale market. After the oil has left the seeds, they become food for stock in the shape of oil cake, while the ashes from the hulls make a fertilizer for root crops.

The first attempt to extract oil from cotton seed was made in Natchez, Miss., in 1834. The machinery of the mill was of the most primitive kind, the pressure being given by wedges. Failure attended this effort, and also an effort in 1852 with improved machinery. In 1855 cotton seed began to have a commercial value. Small mills were established, and the prospects for