SECTION IV : ANTILLES COTTON 271 



exhibited as having very possibly cultivated G. hirsutum. It is thus 

 very likely that in both instances they played an important part 

 in making known the merits and in distributing the original supplies 

 of these the two most valuable of all cotton plants. 



Lamarck, commenting on G. barbadense, says the three glands 

 appear the most diagnostic character of this imperfectly known plant ; 

 then he adds that it grows naturally in Barbados. Cavanilles, while 

 repeating the usual description, admits that the plant was not known 

 to him. Poiret (Z. c.) speaks of it as an American shrub with gla- 

 brous stems, the lower leaves of which are 5-lobed and the upper 

 3-lobed, and the flowers very large yellow. Poiret is more emphatic No men- 

 than Lamarck and Cavanilles, but still makes no mention of the floss i ong ^ 03Si 

 being the longest and finest of all the cottons. Swartz says that it is 

 the cotton tree of the West Indies, but, as already observed, there is 

 little to support that belief. Aublet remarks that in Cayenne they 

 make with the seeds of this species a pectoral and refreshing emul- 

 sion and extract from them an oil still no allusion to the great merit 

 of the fibre. The plant, described by Eoxburgh under the name of 

 G. barbadense, and of which he prepared two admirable MS. drawings 

 nn. 425 and 1,499), is, as he says, much more like Bourbon cotton 

 is certainly not Sea Island. Macfadyen gives a short description 

 in which he remarks that the upper leaves are 3-lobed, the lower 

 ones 5-lobed and triglandular, thus reversing Poiret's description, but 

 he adds that he had not met with it in Jamaica (1837). 



Triana and Planchon placed all the known cottons under this 

 specific name and formed four varieties : (a) vitifolium (= G. bar- 

 badense, Miller ; G. vitifolium, Lamk. ; G. brasiliense, Mac/., and 

 G. peruvianum, Cav.) ; (b) hirsutum (== G. Jiirsutum,L. ; G. punctatum, 

 Thon. et Schum. ; G. punctatum, /3 acerifolium, Guill. et Perrot.) ; 



(c) acuminatum (= G. acuminatum, Boxb., or Fernambuco cotton) ; and 



(d) nigrum (= G. nigrum, var. punctatum, Webb). Grisebach, 

 while speaking of G. barbadense, Linn., remarks that ' it is said to 

 grow spontaneously in the West Indies : I have only examined two 

 West Indian forms.' There are only two plants in Grisebach's 

 herbarium (preserved at Kew), and these, as already observed, appear 

 to be G. brasiliense and G. ? mexicanum, so that very possibly he also 

 had not seen Sea Island cotton from the West Indies so late as 

 1864. 



Wight (I.e. p. 63) mentions an interesting story. He deals with this 

 species and also G. vitifolium in one and the same paragraph, but 



