Cotton has always been regarded as indigenous to India, and as the characteristic clothing material of that country, as flax is of Egypt, silk of China, and the wool of sheep and goats of Northern Asia. The uncertain nature of Hindoo chronology prevents our even guessing at the period when cotton was first spun and woven in India; but there is little doubt that it was so used from the earliest ages of Hindoo civilization. As Dr. Robertson remarks, in his ‘Historical Disquisition on British India’--“Whoever attempts to trace the operations of men in remote times, and to mark the various steps of their progress in any line of exertion, will soon have the mortification to find that the period of authentic history is extremely limited, and if we push our enquiries beyond the period when written history commences we enter upon the region of conjecture, of fable, and of uncertainty.” The earliest mention of cotton with which we are acquainted is found, according to Dr. Royle,[37] in the first book of the Rig Veda, Hymn 105, verse 8, which is supposed to have been composed fifteen centuries before the Christian era. It is, however, a mere allusion to “threads in the loom,” and although it probably does refer to cotton, the evidence of this is only circumstantial. But in ‘The Sacred Institutes of Manu,’ which date from 800 B.C., cotton is referred to so repeatedly as to imply that it was in common use at that time in India. Dr. Royle says, on the authority of Professor Wilson, that cotton and cotton-cloth are mentioned in that book by the Sanscrit names “_Kurpasa_” and “_Karpasum_,” and cotton-seeds as “_Kurpas-asthi_.” The common Bengali name “Kupas,” indicating cotton with the seed, which is still in general use all over India, and may even be occasionally heard in Lancashire, is, no doubt, derived from the Sanscrit, from which also comes the Latin “_carbasus_.” [37] ‘On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and elsewhere,’ by J. Forbes Royle, M.D., F.R.S. London. 1851. It is evident that the manufacture of cotton in India must date from a very remote period indeed, for long before the time of Herodotus the processes of weaving and dyeing it had attained to a degree of excellence which indicates considerable previous experience; and a large export trade in white and coloured cotton fabrics had even then been established.