P. F. FYSON. a 
with Leake,* myself, and others, in regard to an entirely different 
set of plants, the Indian cottons. I became acquainted with 
his work, as also with Fletcher's and Leake’s, only after the 
manuscript of this paper had been written, but I have referred 
in foot-notes to his and their results where they touch on mine. 
Mr. Leake published* after this was written, a note on the 
variation and inheritance of certain characters in cotton plants. 
He determined by measurement the factor “8 of the lobes 
of a leaf, in a number of cases, and found that when a G. indicum 
having rather narrow lobes, was crossed with a G. arborewn with 
broader lobes, the hybrid was of an intermediate type. The next 
generation, he says, ‘ contained, among others, plants with typical 
‘“broad”—and_ typical ‘‘ narrow”—‘ lobed leaves,” but he gives 
no statistics to show the numerical distribution of the different 
types, nor, as far as I know, has any full statistical account been 
published of experiments with cottons on Mendelian lines. 
The experiments described in this paper, of which a 
preliminary account was sent to the “ Director of Agriculture,” 
Madras, in 1906, were begun in the autumn of 1904, soon after 
my arrival in India, with a view to determining whether the 
results of crossing Indian varieties of cotton plants, could be 
described by any ‘ law,” which would guide one in attempting 
to breed new and improved races, and whether any unit charac- 
ters exist or can be found which can be passed on undiluted 
from one variety to another. My observations go to show 
that such unit characters do exist in both vegetative and 
floral organs. I have followed the behaviour of three such 
pairs, the rounded herbaceum or pointed neglectum, shape of 
leaf, the white or yellow colour of the flower, and the white 
fuzzy or black naked seed, for five generations, and from 
observations of some hundreds of plants (817 in the 4th genera- 
tion, 1177 in the 5th) conclude that the characters studied do 
really segregate on Mendelian lines. Balls (18) and Fletchert(4) 
* Leake (9) “Studies in the Experimental Breeding of Indian Cottons,’ Journal of the 
Asiatic Society of Bengal, New Series, Vol. [V, 1908, No. 1. 
+ Fletcher, F. (4) Bulletin No. 26 of the Bombay Agricultural Department, 1907. 
