3 oo SCIENCE PROGRESS 



instructing the surveyor where to go and what to look for, the 

 converse does not hold good. 



On the other hand, intensive work may be held to be 

 insufficiently related to practical needs, for while the behaviour 

 of the plants on one particular experiment station may be 

 interesting, the cultivator who is making his living out of his 

 cotton crop wants to know what to do with his own particular 

 field. The writer ventures to think that intensive work will of 

 itself destroy this objection ; in the event of such a query being 

 made, accompanied by a set of daily observations of flowering 

 and fruiting, it is now possible in Egypt to answer the query 

 with very fair exactitude without moving from the desk. 



The question of cost scarcely enters into the matter. The 

 extra equipmentwhich intensive investigation demands is covered 

 by the lessened travelling expenses and by the smaller scale on 

 which the work is carried out. The financial arrangements for 

 intensive work should probably be more elastic than for survey, 

 since expenses are bound to vary much more from year to year, 

 according as the direction of research veers to minutiae or to 

 masses. 



Lastly, although botany, in the form of plant physiology 

 and genetics, is the science chiefly concerned in the study of 

 cotton, it must not be forgotten that when dealing with a huge 

 commercial product of this kind there are no definite limitations. 

 By transitions which are not merely natural but inevitable, 

 botanical investigations on the cotton crop find themselves stretch- 

 ing out into contact and collaboration with other branches of 

 natural science. Physics and physical instrument-making, meteor- 

 ology, human physiology, statistical mathematics, not to mention 

 such obvious connections as geology and chemistry, all come 

 into intimate relation with the botanical aspect of investigations. 

 To make the most of opportunities requires collaboration, which 

 is not likely to be available except in centres where intensive 

 work is being pursued. The matter seems, in fact, to return 

 again and again to the same suggestion, that such science as 

 that for which commercial interests are now beginning to feel 

 the need, is best to be obtained through a university organisa- 

 tion rather than through appointments in applied science. 



The indications thus pointing to intensive work as the task 

 of the future, it remains to be seen how this can be best applied 

 to provide the uniformity of lint for which the spinners of cotton 



