13735 Gathering Cotton on a Southern Plantation, Dallas, Tex.

Most of the cotton in the world grows on plants in our United States. Do you wonder how cotton is used? Look at the clothes you are wearing. Some of them are sure to be made of cotton. At night you sleep between cotton sheets. Your head is on a cotton pillow slip. If you rip your clothes or pull off a button, your mother sews you a new one with cotton thread. Perhaps you even eat oil made from cotton seeds. There is no plant so useful to the whole world as cotton.

It grows in warm places. In the early spring the ground is plowed. The black seeds are dropped in rows. After a while on the green plants are white blossoms which turn pink. From these come the green cotton bolls. When the bolls are ripe they split open. Then you can see the lovely white, fleecy stuff inside. This is the cotton these Negroes are picking into their bags. In the cotton are many black seeds about as large as the seeds of a lemon. The fibers of the cotton are fastened tightly to them. Long ago these seeds had to be picked out by hand. It was such slow work that raising cotton did not pay. Now a machine separates the lint from the seeds.

Copyright The Keystone View Co.

24083 Tapping a Rubber Tree in the Philippine Islands

Would you like to have this boy’s job? He is tapping this tree to get its milky juice. From the milky juice he will get caoutchouc. Caoutchouc is the sticky rubbery stuff that is in the milky juice from which rubber is made. After the juice dries, sticky, gummy, rubber is left. Some of the juice dries on the tree and leaves bits of this rubber. The boy does not want to waste any rubber, so he strips it off the tree. Can you see where he carries it?

Do you see how he taps the tree? Where does the milky juice come out? What catches the juice as it comes out? Do you think it comes out very fast? Why?

Tell two other things, besides rubber, that are made from juices gotten from trees.

Make a list of all the things you have used that might have been made of this rubber.

What poem do you know that tells of an “India rubber ball”?

Copyright The Keystone View Co.

916403 Bamboo Jungle, Java

Have you ever seen a bamboo fishing pole? If so you have seen a pole made of grass, for bamboo is a kind of grass. It is not the kind that a farmer cuts for hay. Oh, no. But it has many more uses than hay has. What should you think of a hayfield where the grass grew as high as a five or six story house? Bamboo grows as tall as that. It grows in thickets or forests. It lives to be one hundred years old and is green until it dies or is cut. Some stalks are as large as you little finger, some as large around as your leg. All are hollow, strong, light and bend a great deal without breaking. Bamboo grows in India, China, Japan and many islands near these countries. Java is one of these islands. In Java houses are built of bamboo. Sometimes the roofs, too, are bamboo. Its hollow stems are used for boxes.

If you lived in Japan the frame of your kite would be bamboo and you would have bamboo tops. If your father were willing, you might play on a bamboo flute or a set of bamboo whistles fastened together. Your cook would have bamboo spoons, ladles and brushes, your mother bamboo vases and baskets, your father a bamboo stem for his pipe.

Copyright The Keystone View Co.

V23441 Corn Husking by Hand on a New Jersey Farm

Have you ever eaten sweet corn on the cob? Maybe you have watched your mother pull off the green leaves on the outside of the corn before she cooked it. These men are pully the husks from field corn. Field corn is dried on the cob. Tit is then sold and fed to chickens and horses and pigs.

In the spring the farmer plows the land. Then he sows kernels of the corn in rows. When the little green leaves come up through the ground he hoes or cultivates his cornfield to keep the weeds from growing. By the end of summer the corn has put forth lovely tassesls that wave and bend in the wind. Sometimes grow grows twice as tall as a man. See how much taller these stalks are than the man’s head.

When the ears of corn are rip the stalks are cut and piles together in shocks. The men go from shock to another, and strip the husks off the ears of corn. Then some of the corn is sent to the mills to be ground into meal and the rest is piles into corncribs.

What does your mother make out of corn meal?

Copyright The Keystone View Co.

V14939 Rice Field at Plowing Time, Japan

It is rice planting time in Japan. This rice field has been flooded with water from a nearby canal. The water stood for days and softened the ground. Then the farmers plowed the ground until it was soft mud.

The seed rice has been started in beds. When it is a foot high it will be transplanted into this muddy field. The ground must not be allowed to get dry until harvest time as rice must have much moisture.

The finest kind of tea is also grown on this farm. These plants are so tender that they must be protected from the sun. So the farmer makes mats of the rice straw after it has been threshed. These mats he hangs up on poles to shade the plants.

The person* in the picture is bringing more mats in the basket slung on a pole over his shoulder. The person* will hang these mats up and then go for more.

In the big shed the delicate tea leaves are dried very carefully. This kind of tea sells for eight dollars a pound.

* not the term used on the reading card.

Copyright The Keystone View Co.