Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/370



precious stones. Such a specification would have been equally necessary for the direction both of the merchant and of the tax-gatherer.

In confirmation of these remarks it may be observed, that the passages collected in this chapter represent cotton cloth as an expensive and curious production rather than as an article of common use among the Greeks and Romans. Among the ancients linen must have been far cheaper than cotton, whereas the improvements in navigation, the discovery of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope, and still more the discovery of America, have now made cotton the cheaper article among us, and have thus brought it into general use.

India produces several varieties of cotton, both of the herbaceous and the tree kinds. Marco Polo mentions that "cotton is produced in Guzerat in large quantities from a tree that is about six yards in height, and bears during twenty years; but the cotton taken from trees of this age is not adapted for spinning, but only quilting. Such, on the contrary, as is taken from trees of twelve years old, is suitable for muslins and other manufactures of extraordinary fineness ." Sir John Mandeville, on the other hand, who travelled in the fourteenth century, fifty years later than Polo, mentions the annual herbaceous cotton as cultivated in India: he says—"In many places the seed of the cotton, (cothon,) which we call tree-wool, is sown every year, and there springs up from its copses of low shrubs, on which this wool grows ." Forbes also, in his Oriental Memoirs, thus describes the herbaceous cotton of Guzerat:—"The cotton shrub, which grows to the height of three or four feet, and in verdure resembles the currant bush, requires a longer time than rice (which grows up and is reaped in three months) to bring its delicate produce to perfection. The shrubs are planted between the rows of rice, but do not impede its growth, or prevent its being reaped. Soon after the rice harvest is over, the cotton bushes put forth a beautiful yellow flower, with a crimson eye in each petal; this is succeeded by a green pod, filled with a white stringy pulp; the pod turns brown and hard as it ripens, and then separates into two or three divisions