PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SEEDS. 409 



long hairs, whereas the species of the old world have a 

 short down underneath the longer hairs.^ The flower is 

 yellow, with a red centre. The cotton is white or yellow. 

 Parlatore strove to include fifty or sixty of the cultivated 

 forms under one or other of the three heads he admits, 

 from the study of plants in gardens or herbaria. Dr. 

 Masters mentions but few synonyms, and it is possible 

 that certain forms with which he is not acquainted do 

 not come under the definition of his single species. 



Where there is such confusion it would be the best 

 course for botanists to seek with care the Gossypia, which 

 are wild in America, to constitute the one or more species 

 solely upon these, leaving to the cultivated species their 

 strange and often absurd and misleading names. I state 

 this opinion because with regard to no other genus of 

 cultivated plants have I felt so strongly that natural 

 history should be based upon natural facts, and not upon 

 the artificial products of cultivation. If we start from 

 this point of view, which has the merit of being a truly 

 scientific method, we find unfortunately that our know- 

 ledge of the cottons indigenous in America is still in a 

 very elementary state. At most we can name only one 

 or two collectors who have found Gossypia really 

 identical with or very similar to certain cultivated forms. 



We can seldom trust early botanists and travellers 

 on this head. The cotton plant grows sometimes in the 

 neighbourhood of plantations, and becomes more or less 

 naturalized, as the down on the seeds facilitates accidental 

 transport. The usual expression of early writers — such a 

 cotton plant groius in such a country — often means a 

 cultivated plant. Linnaeus himself in the eighteenth 

 century often says of a cultivated species, " habitat^' 

 and he even says it sometimes without good ground.^ 

 Hernandez, one of the most accurate among sixteenth- 

 century authors, is quoted as having described and 

 figured a wild Gossypiu7)i in Mexico, but the text 



^ Masters, in Oliver, Flora of Trop. Africa, i. p. 322 ; and in Hooker, 

 Flora of Brit. India, i. p. 347. 



^ He says, for instance, of Gossypiumherhaceum, which, is certainly of 

 the old world, as facts known before his time show, " habitat in America." 



