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ELI WHITNEY AND THE COTTON GIN.
The cotton industry is one of the most ancient.

One or more of the many species of the cotton plant is indigenous to four continents, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and the manufacture of the fiber into yarn and cloth seems to have developed independently in each of them.

We find mention of cotton in India fifteen hundred years before Christ.

The East Indians, with only the crudest machinery, spun yarn and wove cloth as diaphanous as the best appliances of the present day have been able to produce.
Alexander the Great introduced the "vegetable wool" into Europe.