THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



rhmocerous phyla, etc., is now well established by palceonto- 

 logical evidence, but that the same is true of some forms of the 

 existing mammalian fauna does not appear to have been here- 

 tofore generally recognized. 



A NEW SPECIES OF COTTON FROM A PREHISTORIC 



RUIN IN UTAH. 



In one of the collections gathered by the Hyde Expedition 

 for this Museum there has been found a species of cotton hitherto 

 tmknown to science. 



This collection was made by the \A'etherill brothers in 1894- 

 95. The greater part of the material is from caves and clif? 

 houses of the Grand Gulch region of southeastern Utah and 

 many new and interesting objects have been discovered in the 

 course of renumbering and cataloguing. 



Probably the most interesting discovery to scientists in gen- 

 eral is a number of cotton bolls that were found in a corru- 

 gated jar that rested against the head of a skeleton of a " ilound 

 Dweller." 



This jar is from one of the numerous mounds of the "Mesa 

 Ruins," as they are termed by one of the Wetherills, in the 

 Grand Gulch country of Utah. In the jar were over sixty cap- 

 sule cells, or seed-bearing sections of bolls, some of which con- 

 tained cotton, also small ears of com, seeds, cotton cloth, arrow 

 points, iron ore and pebbles. 



Samples of this cotton were sent to Professor C. F. Mills- 

 paugh of the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, for study; 

 the results of his investigations are embodied in the following 

 letter : 



"The cotton from jar 175 does not correspond to any known 

 species. I have described it under the name Gossypinin abo- 

 rigineimi as a new species and probably the progenitor of our 

 tropic American G. arboreitm." Professor Millspaugh is pre- 

 paring a technical description of this new species, which will 

 appear in one of the botanical journals. — g. h. p. 



36 



