Not only that, but cotton must have been cultivated in Africa at the time when the mariners of Prince Henry the Navigator first made their way cautiously down the west coast. It is, at any rate, upwards of four hundred years since cotton cloth was brought from the coast of Guinea and sold in London as a strange barbaric product. Whether the plant travelled to the Bight of Benin from the land of Prester John, or from the land of the Pharaohs, or across from the Mozambique coast, where the Arabians are supposed to have had settlements and trading stations in prehistoric days, who can now say? But it is curious enough that when Africa was discovered by Europeans, the Dark Continent was actually producing both the fibre and the cloth for which African labour and English skill were afterwards to be needed. The cotton plantations of Southern America were worked by the negroes of Africa in order that the cotton-mills of Lancashire might be kept running. And yet both Africa and America made cotton cloth from the vegetable wool long before we knew of it otherwise than as a traveller's wonder. Even in Asia, the natural habitat of the cotton plant, the story has been curious. Thus, according to the records above named, cotton has been in use for clothing for three thousand years in India, and India borders upon the ancient and extensive Empire of China. Yet cotton was not used in China for cloth-making until the coming of the Tartars, and has been cultivated and manufactured there for only about five hundred years. This was because of the 'vested interests' in wool and silk, which combined to keep out the vegetable wool from general use. To understand aright the romance of cotton we must understand the nature of the plant in its relation to climate. It has been called a child of the tropics, and yet it grows well in other than tropical climes. As Mr Richard Marsden--an authority on cotton-spinning--says: 'Cotton is or can be grown (along) a broad zone extending forty-five degrees north to thirty-five degrees south of the equator. Reference to a map will show that this includes a space extending from the European shores of the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope, from Japan to Melbourne in Australia, and from Washington in the United States to Buenos Ayres in South America, with all the lands intermediate between these several points. These include the Southern States of the American Union, from Washington to the Gulf of Mexico, and three-fourths of South America, the whole of the African Continent, and Southern Asia from the Bosphorus to Pekin in China. The vast area of Australia is also within the cotton zone, and the islands lying between that country and Asia.'