40 TILLERING IN INDIAN SUGARCANES 



been made of tiic gcrniiiiatioii of the HUgaiCtUic seed and the «j)routiiig of 

 planted sets. 



The important question of tilleiin<i, soon connected itself with the dissec- 

 tion work, it being well known that, not only do the thick canes differ consider- 

 ably in this respect among themselves, but, as a whole, they tiller much less 

 freely than the indigenous Indian canes. Unfoitunately there appear to be 

 few accurate observations published on the tillering of Indian canes, and our 

 own notes are far from complete. It is, however, hoped that the facts here 

 presented will give a stimulus to this important side of crop investigation. 

 Even in the tropical sugarcane countries, although a vast number of observa- 

 tions have from time to time been made, there are few papers dealing with the 

 subject from a scientific point of view, and the great bulk of the notes made 

 are not available for our purpose. Spacing, which has given rise to so many 

 experiments in such crops as wheat and paddy, appears to have been occasion- 

 ally tried in sugarcane ; but the results are not easily obtainable, and no 

 help can be got from those crops which are grown for the production of 

 grain. A summary has been prepared of the literature of this part of the 

 subject. 



Attention was soon arrested by the fact, stated by various observers, 

 that, during the lifetime of a cane plantation, a great many deaths occur, 

 so that the number of shoots in early stages greatly exceeds that found at crop 

 time. These observations have been made entirely with thick canes, and doubts 

 arose in our mind as to w^hether they were equally applicable to Indian canes, 

 as the deaths were by no means obvious in the plots. A series of shoot count- 

 ings once a month was accordingly instituted to throw light on the question, 

 but the results of these are not yet available for publication. 



Incidentally, in the course of dissection, it was observed that different 

 cane varieties showed considerable differences in their mode and degree of 

 branching ; and not only was this the case with individual varieties, but 

 whole groups cou'd without difficulty be distinguished from one another in 

 this respect. The degree of branching in the Indian canes Avas seen, as a 

 whole, to differ very considerably from that in thick canes, and this led to a 

 study of that of wild Saccharums, when it was found, as expected, that the 

 Indian canes stood half way between the wild species and the thick canes of 

 the tropics. A further stimulus was thus added to the work, and it was 

 attempted to discover, in the branching of the cane varieties, a means of 

 tracing the origin of the cultivated canes from their wild ancestors, and, among 

 the Indian canes, to select such as might be considered the more primitive, 



