314 



WILD AND CULTIVATED COTTONS 



ROX- 



burgh f 



Enter- 



E^ 

 pany 



Lady 

 Hastmgs 



Appa- 

 rently 



rest the Portuguese colony of Brazil.' Eoxburgh may have been 

 publishing the opinion held by his contributor (Mr. Eobertson, 1800) 

 when he said that it was believed to be a native of the mountains ' to 

 the north and westward of Bengal.' But in the MS. copy of the 

 i ;pi ora Indica ' (preserved in the library of the Kew Herbarium) he 

 gives a different story. ' Native of the mountains to the northward 

 of Bengal, at least the seeds were sent to me from Farrackabad, 

 under the name hill cotton.' In that copy Eoxburgh in his own 

 handwriting corrects the name G. mtifolium, Linn., Sp. PL ed. Willd., 

 in. 804, into G. acuminatum, E. He also furnishes a detailed descrip- 

 tion not given in the ' Flora Indica.' 



Azara (' Voyages dans L'Ame'rique/ conducted in 1781, vol. n., 

 P 1 ^^) P avs a high tribute to the East India Company in that they 

 had procured from Cochabamba seed of the South American cottons, 

 and grown these on the coast of Coromandel and in Bengal. If any 

 such evidence had been necessary we have here from a South 

 American explorer the direct statement of the introduction of the 

 kidney cotton into India. Wallich re-examined the evidence of an 

 Indian habitat, and came to the conclusion that it was only an 

 acclimatised plant in India, and had come very possibly from 

 Surinam in Guiana. And, in still further support of this view, we 

 read in a note on Indian cotton, written in 1829 by Mr. Henry St. 

 George Tucker, that Lady Hastings grew this cotton in an experi- 

 men t a i f arm a t Futteghur near Calcutta. Still earlier, viz. in 1808, 

 Eoger Hunt addressed the East India Company on the causes of 

 deterioration of Pernambuco and Surinam cottons. Mr. Charles 

 Lush in 1839 told the story of the introduction of Pernambuco cotton 

 into Western India, the plant which Hove collected in 1787, so that 

 some time before Eoxburgh had had his attention directed to this 

 plant we have abundant evidence of its introduction into India. 



I* need therefore be no surprise to learn that in Eajputana 

 Duthie found G. brasiliense 'apparently wild,' and bearing the 

 vernacular name ban- (wild) kukri. Mr. Burkill, during a recent 

 exploration in Burma, made a somewhat similar discovery. In a 

 communication on this subject he informs me that ' It produces a 

 beautiful silky and long fibre of much greater value than the other 

 cottons of Burma, but nowhere is it a field crop. It is chiefly to be 

 found in Tenasserim, and is even more plentiful in Amherst toward 

 the Siam border than in the much moister climate of the coast. It 

 occurs in gardens at Pegu, and at Kyaukse (in the irrigated tract) it 



