86 WILD AND CULTIVATED COTTONS 



remarks under G. Nanking var. Boji., p. 135.) But in Lower Egypt 

 the cultivation of a cotton-plant does not very possibly date further 

 back than the thirteenth century. 



Egypt. Abdollatiph an Arab physician who visited Egypt in 1200 A.D. 



and published a list of the useful plants seen by him makes no 

 mention of cotton. Prosper Alpinus (who visited Egypt in 1580 and 

 published his ' De PL ^Egypt.' in 1592) says of the plant figured and 

 described by him, that it was only grown in a few gardens, and that 

 the Egyptians import the cotton they use, since the herbaceous plant 

 of Syria does not grow in Egypt. Belon (' Plurim. Singu. Ker. in 

 Graecia Observ.' 1589, p. 295), who visited Egypt about the same 

 time as Alpinus, makes no mention of cotton in that country though 

 he speaks of cotton trees as seen by him on the hills of Arabia near 

 Mount Sinai. He also observes that the garments woven of it are 

 finer than silk and whiter than those of cotton, by which he 

 presumably means Syrian cotton. 



The Egyptian frescoes and sculptures frequently represent fields 

 of corn or of flax, but never of cotton a circumstance that it would 

 be difficult to account for had cotton been regularly grown and its 

 extremely valuable fibre understood by the early Egyptians. Yates 



Pliny : (' Text. Antiq.' pp. 334-53, 453 and 467-72) says that copies of Pliny 

 ux ' and also of Julius Pollux (a century later) had marginal notes 

 inscribed on them, regarding cotton cultivation in Egypt during the 

 fourteenth century. Subsequent editions of these classics erroneously 

 incorporated these notes into the original text, and hence had come 

 about the belief that cotton cultivation in Egypt had been described 

 by Pliny and Pollux, whereas there is no evidence of Egyptian 

 knowledge of the cotton plant prior to the thirteenth century. Many 

 of the Arab writers, however, speak of what appears to be the fibre 

 or this species, as spun and woven, and of the textiles thus produced 

 being called sessa, so that there seems little doubt its utilisation, if 

 not cultivation, dates from fairly ancient times in Arabia, and was 

 continued to at least the middle of the sixteenth century. 



In a further page I shall endeavour to deal with the cultivated 

 forms of G. arboreum, Linn., and to cite well-known specimens in 

 herbaria. It is desired here to establish the belief that there can be 



Original accepted as existing a special form which, if not an original wild 



wild stock, gfjock an ^ j therefore, botanically a species, is remarkably near to 

 what we are justified in believing may have been one of the ancestral 

 stocks of many of the cultivated cotton plants of the Old World. 



