224 KUMPTA COTTON AND ITS IMPROVEMENT 



largely ou three types of branches — monopodia, .sympodia, and axillaries — 

 which are developed at different stages of the plant's groM'th, is that the 

 herbaceum cottons hear during a very long period, or, in other words, tend to 

 ripen bolls over a good many months. 



(d) The herhaceum cottons can, as a rule, be distinguished among other 

 varieties by the light, rather yellowish, green colour of the leaves and 

 stems. Other cotton plants are nearly all very much darker green in colour. 

 So much so that a field of a herhaceum cotton looks almost mihealthy to 

 anyone who has been accustomed to deal with other species of cotton. 



(e) The bolls of the herbaceum cottons are much rounder in shape than 

 those of almost any other variety. This character will be seen in Plate I, 

 where a number of types of bolls found in kumpta cotton are illustrated. But 

 whether we have to deal ^nth the small-boiled kumpta, cTr the much larger- 

 boiled herhaceum cottons of Gujarat, the roundness of the boll is a feature of 

 Gossijpium herbaceum. This roundness varies a good deal, and there is a 

 general belief among the growers that more elongated bolls tend to give a 

 longer staple cotton than round bolls, but the correlation between these 

 characters has never hitherto been investigated. 



These various characters of the herhaceum cottons when grown as 

 agricultm"al plants mark them off from their congeners, tend to give a large crop 

 of low-ginning cotton, and lead to the limitation of their distribution to places 

 where a long-growing period is possible either on accomit of a well-distributed 

 rainfall or irrigation, or on account of the absence of the likelihood of frost. 

 Where the growing period can only be short, for whatever reason, other t}^es 

 of cotton tend to prevail which may not yield so well, but which ripen quicker, 

 and which often, though not always, in India, give a cotton of inferior staple. 



III. " KuMPTA " COTTONS. 



One of the most important tj'pes of Gossypium herbaceum cultivated in 

 India is that known commercially under the name kumpta, a name probably 

 derived, as Mollison^ notes, from the fact that much of the cotton produced 

 in the kumpta tracts reached Bombay, in the pre-railway days, via the port of 

 Kumpta in North Kanara. The name is more restricted than the tj-pe of 

 cotton, and this latter spreads continuously over a very large area in the 

 Southern Maratha Country of the Bombay Presidency, as well as into Mysore 

 and the Nizam's Dominions. The attached map (Plate II) shows for the 

 Bombay-British districts the intensity with which it is cultivated. It, however, 



1 " Textbook of Agriculture " (1902), Vol. Ill, pp. 200-201. 



