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Bible Encyclopedias
Cotton
Kitto's Popular Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature
or Cotton is well known to be a wool-like substance which envelopes the seeds, and is contained within the roundish-pointed capsule or fruit of the cotton-shrub. Everyone also knows that cotton has, from the earliest ages, been characteristic of India. But in the present day cotton, by the aid of machinery, has been manufactured in this country on so extensive a scale, and sold at so cheap a rate, as to have driven the manufacture of India almost entirely out of the market. Still, however, until a very recent period, the calicoes and chintzes of India formed very extensive articles of commerce from that country to Europe. India possesses two very distinct species of plants from which cotton is obtained: 1. K. Gossipium herbaceum of botanists, of which there are several varieties, some of which have spread north, and also into the south of Europe, and into Africa. 2. Gossipium arboreum, or cotton-tree, which is little cultivated on account of its small produce, but which yields a fine kind of cotton. This must not be confounded, as it often is, with the silk-cotton tree, or Bombyx heptaphyllum, which does not yield a cotton fit for spinning. Cotton is now chiefly cultivated in Central India, from whence it is carried to and exported from Broach. It is also largely cultivated in the districts of the Bombay Presidency, as also in that of Madras, but less in Bengal, except for home manufacture, which of course requires a large supply, where so large a population are all clothed in cotton. The supplies of cotton which we derive from America are obtained from two entirely distinct species—Gossipium Barbadense, of which different varieties yield the Sea Island, Upland, Georgian, and the New Orleans cottons; while G. Peruvianum yields the Brazil, Pernambuco, and other South American cottons. These species are original natives of America. It is probable that cotton was imported into Egypt and known to the Hebrews, but it is extremely difficult to prove the fact: the subject has been extensively investigated, but the point is still undetermined.
Public Domain.
Kitto, John, ed. Entry for 'Cotton'. "Kitto's Popular Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature". https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/kbe/c/cotton.html.
