XI

SOLIDIFIED SUNSHINE

All life and all that life accomplishes depend upon the supply of solar energy stored in the form of food.  The chief sources of this vital energy are the fats and the sugars.  The former contain two and a quarter times the potential energy of the latter.  Both, when completely purified, consist of nothing but carbon, hydrogen and oxygen; elements that are to be found freely everywhere in air and water.  So when the sunny southland exports fats and oils, starches and sugar, it is then sending away nothing material but what comes back to it in the next wind.  What it is sending to the regions of more slanting sunshine is merely some of the surplus of the radiant energy it has received so abundantly, compacted for convenience into a portable and edible form.

In previous chapters I have dealt with some of the uses of cotton, its employment for cloth, for paper, for artificial fibers, for explosives, and for plastics.  But I have ignored the thing that cotton is attached to and for which, in the economy of nature, the fibers are formed; that is, the seed.  It is as though I had described the aeroplane and ignored the aviator whom it was designed to carry.  But in this neglect I am but following the example of the human race, which for three thousand years used the fiber but made no use of the seed except to plant the next crop.

Just as mankind is now divided into the two great classes, the wheat-eaters and the rice-eaters, so the ancient world was divided into the wool-wearers and the cotton-wearers.  The people of India wore cotton; the Europeans wore wool.  When the Greeks under Alexander fought their way to the Far East they were surprised to find wool growing on trees.  Later travelers returning from Cathay told of the same marvel and travelers who stayed at home and wrote about what they had not seen, like Sir John Maundeville, misunderstood these reports and elaborated a legend of a tree that bore live lambs as fruit.  Here, for instance, is how a French poetical botanist, Delacroix, described it in 1791, as translated from his Latin verse: 

  Upon a stalk is fixed a living brute,
  A rooted plant bears quadruped for fruit;
  It has a fleece, nor does it want for eyes,
  And from its brows two wooly horns arise. 
  The rude and simple country people say
  It is an animal that sleeps by day
  And wakes at night, though rooted to the ground,
  To feed on grass within its reach around.

But modern commerce broke down the barrier between East and West.  A new cotton country, the best in the world, was discovered in America.  Cotton invaded England and after a hard fight, with fists as well as finance, wool was beaten in its chief stronghold.  Cotton became King and the wool-sack in the House of Lords lost its symbolic significance.

Still two-thirds of the cotton crop, the seed, was wasted and it is only within the last fifty years that methods of using it have been developed to any extent.