MUTATIVK HKVERSIONS IN COTTON. 9 



tendencies in their naked seeds and sliort, sparse lint. In many such 

 eases the petals are of a somewhat lighter yellow than usual, oi' the 

 purple spot may not be so deeply colored, but paler petals and spots 

 may occur without any other departure from Egyptian characters. 

 No one character can be trusted as evidence of the presence of Hindi 

 tendencies, )ior is there any reason to suppose that a failure to show 

 Hindi characters in one genei'ation excludes their appearance in an- 

 other, any more than with thesmall-})()lled and other inferior i-eversions 

 that appear in Upland varieties. Some of the Hindi characteis, 

 such as the naked black seed with short, sparse lint confined to one 

 end, are a feature of many small-boiled reversions that appear in 

 Upland cotton. 



Instead of thinking of the Hindi cotton as a distinct independent 

 type which has become hybridized recently with the Egyptian, it 

 may be considered that the Hindi characters merely represent some 

 of the extremes of variation of the Egyptian. Whether the two 

 types were originally distinct or not may make little difference with 

 the present facts. TJiere seems to be no definite evidence of the 

 independent existence of the Hindi cotton, either as an indigenous 

 wild plant or as a domesticated variety. It would doubtless be easy 

 to establish the Hindi cotton as a uniform "pure" stock in the same 

 way that selection can establish uniform types from other variations 

 of the Egyptian cotton, but it is a type that w^ould hardly invite 

 cultivation, even among savages. A pale-flowered tree cotton 

 witliout a petal spot was described in Egypt by Vesling about 1640, 

 and Fletcher is inclined to believe that this was the prototype of the 

 Hindi cotton. The Egyptian cotton itself is supposed to liave been 

 brought from India to Egypt only about a century ago, but even on 

 this reckoning the time has certainly been ample for the most complete 

 intermixture to have taken place.'* 



The general absence of intermediate plants may be taken as an 

 indication that recent interbreeding with Hindi has been avoided 

 in tlie best of the imported Egyptian stocks, but at least a few indi- 

 viduals of the extreme Hindi type have been found in all. The 

 remarkably close similarity of the extreme Hindi plants in all of the 

 newly imported stocks also supports the idea that such plants rep- 

 resent complete reversions. It is ver}^ difficult to believe that all 

 the stocks have h'ad the same opportunities of securing recent inter- 

 inixtures of pure Hindi seed. The juore pronounced of the Hintli 

 plants are as uniforin among themselves as the Egyptian plants in 

 the same stage of acclimatization. Indeed, they appear even more 



« See Fletcher, F., "The Origin of the Egyptian Cotton," Cairo Scientific Journal, 

 vol. 2, no. 26, November, 1908, p. 383. 



27297— Cir. 53—10 2 



