COTTON Seed.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 308, 17 October 1888, Page 3

COTTON Seed.

The ' Atlanta Constitution ' asks was there ever such a history as thai of the cotton seed? For seventy years despised as a nuisance, and burned or dumped as garbage. Then discovered to be the very food for which the soil was hungering, and reluctantly admitted to the rank of utilities. Shortly afterwards found to be nutritious food for beast as well as for soil, and thereupon treated with something like respect. One* 1 admitted to the circle of farm husbandries, found to hold thirty-five gallons of puio oil to the ton, or 840,000,000 ior the w hole crop of seed. Bab then the system was devised for refining this oil up to a value of $1 a gallon, and the frugal Italian placed a cask of it at the root of every olive tree and then defied the Borean breath of the Alp*. And then experience showed that the ton of cotton seed was a better fertiliser and a better stock when robbed of its 35 gallons of oil than before. And that the hulls of tho seed made the best of fuel for feeding the oil mill engine. And that the ashes of the hulls scooped from the engine's draft had the highest commercia' value a-; potash. And that the ' refuse ' of the whole made the best and purest soap stock, to carry to the toilet the perfumes of Lubiu or Colgate. About this time we began to spell cotton seed with capital letters. And how it travelled abroad in various diesses ! As meal cakes it whitened the meadows of England with woolly fleeces and fattened the British cattle under the oaks ; it sputtered on the stoves of the dutch in lieu of lard : it glistened ,in the cafes of Paris as olive oils under seals and signatures it couldn't e\en pronounce to save its life, and from under'tho dykes in Holland it went forth to paiade in all the bravery of butter and butterine. In our own country itrenewed the wasting strength of Southern fields and clad them with whiteness that would shame the fleeces of England, or yellow that would pale the fleeces ot Argonaus. It knocked the western hog into spots and poured the western lard out. of the frying-pan into the fire. It furnished the Armours and the Fairbanks with a pure substance for the rancid fat they had been shipping us, and suggested the possibility of a clean and cheap lard. And about this time Congress jumyed on to cotton seed with both feet and proposed to check its further career by a prohibitory tax. And now comes a gentleman of Atlanta with a process by which he extracts 30 gallons of fine oil from every ton of cotton seed meal aiter the oil mill has done with it. In the ' tailings ' of the oil mills he finds this unexpected and ample store, which he deftly extracts with naphtha, leaving the meal more nutritious as food for beast or field than before he took $10 per ton from it. This process he has proved repeatedly in his laboratory. This invention will add 40 per cent, to the quantity of oil taken by the old process from a given quantity of seed.