At the beginning of the Christian era we find cotton in cultivation and in use in Persia, Arabia, and Egypt--but whether indigenous to these countries, or conveyed westward during the centuries from India, we know not. Thereafter, the westward spread was slow; but the plant is to be traced along the north coast of Africa to Morocco, which country it seems to have reached in the 9th century. The Moors took the plant, or seeds, to Spain, and it was being grown on the plains of Valencia in the 10th century; and by the 13th century it was, as we have said, growing in various parts of Southern Europe. Yet, although the Indian cloths were known to the Greeks and Romans a century or two before the Christian era, and although in the early centuries Arab traders brought to the Red Sea ports Indian calicoes, which were distributed in Europe, we find cotton known in England only as material for candle-wicks down to the 17th century. At any rate, M'Culloch is our authority for believing that the first mention of cotton being manufactured in England is in 1641; and that the 'English cottons,' of which earlier mention may be found, were really _woollens_. And now we come to a very curious thing in the Romance of Cotton. Columbus discovered--or, as some say, rediscovered--America in 1492; and when he reached the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the natives who came off to barter with him brought, among other things, cotton yarn and thread. Vasco da Gama, a few years later than Bartholomew Diaz, in 1497 rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Zanzibar coast. There the natives were found to be clothed in cotton, just as Columbus found the natives of Cuba to be, as Pizarro found the Peruvians, and as Cortes found the Mexicans. These Europeans, proceeding from the Iberian Peninsula east and west, found the peoples of the new worlds clothed with a material of which they knew nothing. Cotton was king in America, as in Asia, before it began even to be known in Western Europe.