THE VARIETAL CHARACTERS OF 
INDIAN WHEATS. 
BY 
ALBERT HOWARD), m.a., F.L.s., 
Imperial Economic Botanist 
AND 
GABRIELLE L. C. HOWARD, s.a., 
Associate and late Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. 
I, INTRODUCTORY. 
Durine the year 1905, a collection of the wheats grown on the 
various experimental farms in India was made at Pusa and sown in 
October of that year. At the same time, a very largeset of samples 
of the wheat actually sown by the cultivators in the districts of 
the Central Provinces and Bengal was, thanks to the assistance of 
the Directors of Agriculture and the District Officers of these Prov- 
inces, placed at our disposal. An analysis of these samples and of 
the crops grown in the field in many parts of India during the har- 
vest of 1906, showed that the degree of admixture of totally differ- 
ent types in the wheat fields of India is very great. Further, many 
of the wheat plots on the experimental farms considered to be pure 
cultures were in reality mixed, and it became evident that the first 
condition of wheat improvement in India was the isolation and 
growth in pure culture of the types already in the country. The 
importance of this work cannot be overestimated. Pure cultures 
are necessary for all wheat experiments both for breeding purposes 
and also for manurial, cultivation and variety trials, for seed distri- 
bution and for milling and baking tests. Everything therefore 
depends on this preliminary work, and until we know with precision 
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