194 



WILD AND CULTIVATED COTTONS 



Recessive 

 forms. 



Mexican 

 stock. 



A revolu- 

 tion in 

 forms 

 grown. 



parents had sometimes yielded fuzzy-seeded offspring. This has 

 been traced to climate, soil, or method of cultivation &c., but 

 without disputing the value of environment as a factor in the 

 multiplicity of cottons (and assuming the stock to be hybrid), the 

 theory of recessive splitting forms or, as it has been called, the 

 tendency to reversion to one or other of the ancestors is quite as 

 natural and permissible an explanation as any that can be given. 



Apart, therefore, from the fact that crossing with Mexican stock 

 has been frequently mentioned by writers on this subject, and further 

 that for years past an almost continuous importation of fresh seed 

 from Mexico into the United States has taken place, the plants them- 

 selves give undoubted evidence of a gradual progression from one type 

 to another. Even within my personal experience I can mark this 

 transition. The specimens furnished to me by numerous friends in 

 the United States, but a few years ago, were collectively much closer 

 to the specific type of G. hirsutum than seems to be the case to-day. 

 Through the generous co-operation of Mr. B. T. Galloway, of the 

 United States Department of Agriculture, I have recently received 

 from Mr. Lyster H. Dewey, Botanist in Charge of the Fiber Plants 

 Section of the Bureau of Plant Industry, a splendid series of some 

 sixty botanical specimens of the cotton plants at present being culti- 

 vated. Of these seven are accepted by me as forms with a strong 

 strain of G. hirsutum, whereas something like forty approximate even 

 more nearly to G. mexicanum, while the balance are forms of G.punc- 

 tatum, G. barbadense, dc. In fact, it might fairly well be affirmed 

 that the past twenty or thirty years have witnessed an almost com- 

 plete revolution in the stock of short staple or Upland cottons of the 

 United States. This, I venture to think, will be abundantly exempli- 

 fied by a comparison of Plates Nos. 29 and 31, which manifest the 

 original or type condition of G. hirsutum, the green-seed cotton of 

 Georgia and Carolina in 1732, with Plates Nos. 41 and 42, which 

 exemplify two of the many types of present day Uplands. So 

 vastly have these plants advanced and improved that it may be said 

 the Uplands in some instances (Allen, Sunflower, &c.), differ from the 

 Sea Islands alone in the staple being a few millimetres shorter. And 

 speaking of the Allen, Sunflower, &c. the Long Staple Uplands 

 remind me also of a curious circumstance namely, that judged of 

 by botanical standards, they appear to be hybrids of G. hirsutum 

 x barbadense, and bear little or no trace of a mexicanum influence. 

 (Cf. pp. 234-5). 



