6 OKIGIN OF THE HINDI COTTON. 



The suggestions of scientific students of the Hindi cotton are 

 hardly more consistent. Sir George Watt's monograph of cotton 

 connects the Hindi plant with no less than three species supposed to 

 be native in different parts of the world, but he refers it most directly 

 to Gossyplum punctatimi, and states that this species grows wild in 

 the United States. Some of our cultivated Upland cottons, such as 

 the King variety, are reckoned as varieties or hybrids of Gossypium 

 punctatum^ and the Moqui cotton of the Arizona Indians is definitely 

 referred to this species." 



In reality there is no wild cotton in any of the cotton-growing re- 

 gions of the United States. In Texas and other Gulf States warm 

 winters often allow the roots to survive and send up new shoots in 

 the spring, but in cold years all the cotton is killed throughout the 

 cotton belt. The only indigenous wild type of cotton known in the 

 United States is that found in the extreme southern part of Florida 

 and on the Florida Keys, unless we take into account the varieties 

 cultivated by the Indians of Arizona, and these varieties have never 

 been planted in other parts of the United States except in very re- 

 cent experiments. 



Watt dwells in particular upon the claim that the Hindi cotton re- 

 sembles Moqui cotton from Arizona ; but when the living plants are 

 compared, the resemblance between the Moqui and Flindi cottons ap- 

 pears no greater than that between the Hindi and our Upland va- 

 rieties. The Hindi cotton finds a much closer alliance with other 

 types of cotton from southern Mexico and Central America. These 

 types belong to the general Upland series, but they have not been 

 known in the United States until very recently and have been planted 

 thus far only in a few localities and only on an experimental basis. 



HINDI COTTON RELATED TO MEXICAN VARIETIES. 



The vegetative characters of the Hindi cotton show the closest 

 approximation to those of some of the Mexican varieties from the 

 State of Chiapas and in particular to a type obtained by Mr. G. N. 

 Collins in 1906 at the town of Acala. There are the same light, yel- 

 lowish green, broad, short-lobed, smooth, naked leaves and the same 

 strongly zigzag fruiting branches which frequently branch again 

 from the axillary buds. As in the Hindi cotton, the bolls are pale 

 green, the oil glands that show as black dots on the bolls of Egyptian 

 cotton being buried deeply in the green tissues. The involucral bracts 

 are rounded and very deeply cordate at base, as in the Hindi cotton, 

 and the margins have longer and coarser teeth, carried down nearer 



«Watt, St. George. The Wild and Cultivated Cotton Plants of the World, 

 London, 1907, p. 181. 

 [Cir. 42] 



