COTTON SEED OIL.

"Cotton seed oil," said Mr. A.E. Thornton, of the Atlanta mills, "is one of the most valuable of oils because it is a neutral oil, that is, neither acid nor alkali, and can be made to form the body of any other oil. It assimilates the properties of the oil with which it is mixed. For instance, olive oil. Cotton seed oil is taken and a little extract of olives put in. The cotton oil takes up the properties of the extract, and for all practical purposes it is every bit as good as the pure olive oil. Then it is used in sweet oil, hair oil, and, in fact, in nearly all others. A chemist cannot tell the prepared cotton oil from olive oil except by exposing a saucerful of each, and the olive oil becomes rancid much quicker than the cotton oil. The crude oil is worth thirty cents a gallon, and even as it is makes the finest of cooking lard, and enters into the composition of nearly all lard."

A visit to the mills showed how the oil is made. From the platform where the seed is unloaded it is thrown into an elevator and carried by a conveyor—an endless screw in a trough—to the warehouse. Then it is distributed by the conveyor uniformly over the length of the building—about 200 feet. The warehouse is nearly half filled now, and thousands and thousands of bushels are lying in store. Another elevator carries the seed up to the "sand screen." This is a revolving cylinder made of wire cloth, the meshes being small enough to retain the seed, which are inside the cylinder, but the sand and dirt escape. Now the seeds start down an inclined trough. There is something else to be taken out, and that is the screws and nails and rocks that were too large to be sifted out with the sand and dirt. There is a hole in the inclined trough, and up through that hole is blown a current of air by a suction fan. If it were not for the fan, the cotton seed, rocks, nails, and all would fall through. The current keeps up the cotton seed, and they go on over, but it is not strong enough to keep up the nails and pebbles, and they fall through. Now the seed, free of all else, is carried by another elevator and endless screw conveyor to the "linter." This is really nothing more than a cotton gin with an automatic feed.

"HULLER" AND "HEATERS."

Then the seed is carried to the "huller," where it is crushed or ground into a rough meal about as coarse as the ordinary corn "grits." The next step is to separate the hulls from the kernels, all the oil being in the kernel, so the crushed seed is carried to the "separator." This is very much on the style of a sand screen, being a revolving cylinder of wire cloth. The kernels, being smaller than the broken hulls, fall through the broken meshes, and upon this principle the hull is separated and carried direct to the furnace to be used as fuel. The kernels are ground as fine as meal, very much as grist is ground, between corrugated steel "rollers," and the damp, reddish colored meal is carried to the "heater."

The "heater" is one iron kettle within another, the six inch steam space between the kettles being connected direct with the boilers. There are four of these kettles side by side. The meal is brought into this room by an elevator, the first "heater" is filled, and for twenty minutes the meal is subjected to a "dry cook," a steam cook, the steam in the packet being under a pressure of forty-five pounds. Inside the inner kettle is a "stirrer," a revolving arm attached at right angles to a vertical shaft. The stirrer makes the heating uniform, and the high temperature drives off all the water in the meal, while the involatile oil all remains.

In five minutes the next heater is filled, in five minutes the next, etc.

Now there are four "heaters," and as the last heater is filled—at the end of twenty minutes—the first heater is emptied. Then at the end of five minutes the first heater is filled, and the one next to it is emptied, and the rotation is kept up, each heater full of meal being "dry-cooked" for twenty minutes.

Corresponding to the four heaters are four presses. Each press consists of six iron pans, shaped like baking pans, arranged one above the other, and about five inches apart. The pans are shallow, and around the edge of each is a semicircular trough, and at the lowest point of the trough is a funnel-shaped hole to enable the oil to run from one pan to the next lowest, and from the lowest pan to the "receiving tanks" below.

PRESSING OUT THE OIL.

As soon as a "heater" is ready to be emptied, the meal is taken out and put into six hair sacks, corresponding to the six pans in the press. There are six hair mats about one foot wide and six long, one side of each being coated with leather. The hair mat is about an inch thick. Now the hair sack, containing ten and a half to eleven pounds of heated steaming meal, is placed on one end of the mat, and the meal distributed so as to make a pad or cushion of uniform thickness. The pad of meal is not quite three feet long, a foot wide, and three inches thick, and the hair mat is folded over, sandwiching the pad and leaving the leather coating of the pad outside. In this form the six loads are put into the six pans, and by means of a powerful hydraulic press the pans are slowly pressed together. The oil begins trickling out at the side, slowly at first, and then suddenly it begins running freely. The pressure on the "loads" is 350 tons. After being pressed about five minutes, the pressure is eased off and the "loads" taken out. What had been a mushy pad three inches thick is a hard, compact cake about three-quarters of an inch thick, and the sack is literally glued to the cake. The crude oil has a reddish muddy color as it runs into the tanks.

To one side were lying great heaps of sacks of yellowish meal—the cakes which have been broken and ground up into meal. That, as explained above, forms the body of all fertilizers. The following is a summary of the work for the eight months' season at the Atlanta mills:

Fifteen thousand tons of seed used give:

Fifteen million pounds of hull.

Ten million three hundred and thirty-one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds of meal.

Four million six hundred and sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds of oil.

Three hundred thousand pounds of lint cotton.

The meal is worth at the rate of $6 for 700 pounds, or $88,603.58.

The oil is worth thirty cents a gallon, or seven and a half pounds, or $186,750.

The lint is worth $18,000, making a total of $293,353, and that doesn't include the 15,000,000 pounds of hull.—Atlanta Constitution.