Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/225

At the request of the Secretary I will venture to give the reasons why I have made an exception to my recent rule of avoiding any new responsibility on account of advancing age, and have joined the National Geographic Society. In giving my reasons for this exception and my sense of the importance of this organization I must of necessity give my personal experience, or a part of what the artist, Chester Harding, called his reminiscences—a chapter from my "egotistigraphy."

When I left school, in 1842, to begin work in a commission house for the sale of textile fabrics I had received the ordinary instruction in geography by learning lessons out of Worcester's school book. After serving the customary apprenticeship of those days, before porters and janitors were employed to do the heavy work, I happened to enter the counting-room of the treasurer of a cotton factory, where I began a course of business life, which has kept me in more or less intimate relations with the cotton manufacture from 1848 to the present time.

It had been my practice as a youth to get at the underlying facts in regard to any pursuit to which my attention had been called. Therefore when I found that my business life might be occupied in the cotton manufacture, perhaps permanently, I put to myself the question, "What is cotton? Why and how does it spin? Where is the center of production?" and so on.

On putting these questions to my elder associates I could get but little information. The common impression among the cotton manufacturers of New England was that cotton was a tropical plant that could only be cultivated by negroes; that the cotton states were substantially tropical states, where white men could not work in the field, and that when the crop was being gathered the whole area of the cotton states would resemble the North under a snow storm—white with the maturing cotton.

This impression had been vigorously promoted by the slave-holding interests and led later to the opposition of what were known at the time as the "Cotton Whigs" to any efforts to remove the curse of slavery.

I then supposed, as all my associates appeared to, that the reason why cotton could be spun was that it was barbed or bearded like rye, and that these barbs interlocked in making the thread—a totally erroneous conception.

Not being satisfied with these conditions, I began my own researches. I procured books from the libraries and strained a point to buy some books of importance from my rather meager earnings. I found it necessary to comprehend the physical geography, the geology, the climatology, and the chemistry of the soils of all the cotton-producing countries; the chemistry of the plant, and the social conditions of each cotton-producing section. Of course, this was a matter of long, tedious, and often misdirected study; but in the end I had attained a considerable amount of geographical knowledge. In fact, it may be said that when one picks out a lock of cotton from the boll in the cotton field, twists it with his fingers, and, doubling with the teeth, makes a strong cord without the aid of any mechanism, he may find in his imagination his counterpart in the Aryan woman of prehistoric time, who, taking a lock of cotton from the boll in India and going through with the same process, made the first piece of cotton cord; and then as he untwists that strand or follows its convolutions