58 ANNUAL KEPORTS OF DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



domesticated. The use of these superior varieties in the United 

 States has been considered impracticable, owing to their general 

 failure to produce a crop within the limits of the summer season. It 

 has now been learned that the behavior of many of these imported 

 varieties when first planted in the United States is abnormal and that 

 they can be led back to normal fertility and earliness by a few seasons 

 of acclimatization and selective breeding. 



Several new types of Upland cotton have been introduced from 

 Mexico and Central America and acclimatized in Texas. Although 

 they yielded very little cotton at first, they have now become as pro- 

 ductive and as uniform as any of the United States Upland varieties 

 that are being tested in the same places. Some of the new types 

 produce larger bolls and longer lint than any of the varieties now 

 generally cultivated in Texas, and these advantages occur in combi- 

 nation with other desirable qualities, such as extreme earliness, tol- 

 erance of drought, and resistance to the attacks of the boll weevil. 



Local adjustment of cotton varieties. — The same biological 

 factors of abnormal behavior that make it necessary to acclimatize 

 imported varieties have also been found to afTect the United States 

 Upland varieties. A carefully bred variety that is uniformly early 

 and productive in its home district may show much individual diver- 

 sity when carried to a new place and may require a new course of 

 selection to give it complete adjustment to the new locality. A 

 large proportion of the plants that depart from the standards of the 

 variety become distinctly inferior, like the reversions that occur more 

 frequently in hybrid stocks and in primitive unimproved types of 

 cotton. Failure to remove inferior "rogue" plants is one of the 

 causes, if not the principal cause, of the rapid "running out" of 

 varieties of cotton when selection is relaxed. Continued selection is 

 necessar}'' as a regular farm operation to maintain the uniformity and 

 productive efficiency of high-grade varieties. 



Extension of cotton culture in the United States. — There 

 is a general impression that the cotton-gro%\'ing lands of the United 

 wStates are all occupied and that the presence of the boll weevil will 

 prevent any future increase of this crop, but this is a mistake. 

 There are large possibilities for cotton production in the drier parts 

 of the Western and Southwestern States, where the boll weevil can 

 do little damage. 



Experiments in Texas, Kansas, Arizona, and Cahfornia indicate 

 that cotton of excellent quality can be produced in many regions 

 where none has been grown in the past. The status of the cotton as 

 a dry-land plant is still very inadequately appreciated. It yields a 

 marketable product with less water than any other crop now grown 

 in the Southwest. A small amount of irrigation can be used more 

 effectively with cotton than with any other crop, and even without 



