Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/773

 Popular Science Moithli/

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��cotton is blown through the pipe running to the rear of the machine, where it is caught in sacks or baskets, while the finely broken up leaves and dirt are blown through openings in the pipe by which the cotton passes in its course.

Working ten hours a day, the machine is stated to pick one thousand pounds per nozzle, or five thousand pounds per day in all. Hand labor picks about one hun- dred and fifty pounds.

Weighing but one thousand pounds, the machine is easily moved along by means of a horse. The perfected model will use a transmission arrangement to the rear wheels, and be driven under its own power.

The superiority of the machine over hand labor was plainly shown in the Im- perial Valley, where the intense heat makes hand labor hard to obtain, and in- efficient when obtained. It proved easier to obtain five men at good wages to manipulate the nozzles than to secure the picking equivalent in hand labor during the hot months.

A successful cotton picker, as this promises to be, means an enormous saving in the cost of cotton production with no lowering of the profit to the planter, and the release of hundreds of thousands of badly needed laborers for other fields of endeavor.

We have heard much lately concerning the migration of the negroes northward. As they are the pickers of the cotton, may not such a machine as this have some little bearing on the future Southern economics ?

����Here is the gang at work. The pickers are at the nozzles and the machine is standing end on

��Grownups who are not still young enough to climb trees are barred from entering

This Tree-House Is in Massachu- setts, Not in Africa

A MAN in Salem, Massachusetts, has built a playhouse in a tree for his children. It was given its lofty position in order to add novelty to its other attrac- tions. An old tree with two branches extending straight out in two directions lent itself admirably to the purpose, but in order to make the location doubly secure, props were put under the limbs and a rod was run through the main branch of the tree and through t-he little house itself to the support in the rear. Thus it was made wind-proof and rigid and firmly supported.

Entrance to the house is gained by means of a ladder, if you are not agile enough to climb a tree. During the summer, when the leaves are on the tree, the children of the family have a delightfully cool and shaded place of their own. Here they reign supreme and can amuse themselves in any old way they wish, without "getting on the nerves" of the grownups.

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