328 



WILD AND CULTIVATED COTTONS 



Study of 

 environ- 

 ment. 



Degraded 

 states. 



Specific 

 characters. 



if failure results there can be no great harm done. That is an error 

 far more more serious than such persons realise. Every promiscuous 

 experiment not only defers systematic investigation but adds a new 

 disappointment that in time is certain to give the disastrous impression 

 namely that all endeavours at improvement are fruitless. Acclima- 

 tisation should only be attempted after the most careful study of the 

 environment of the original and the proposed new country of produc- 

 tion. And as a rule it is safer to bring the stock through a succession 

 of stages or regions and conditions than direct. It has only been by 

 gradual transitions, for example, that perennial stocks of equatorial 

 regions have been changed into annual crops of temperate tracts. 

 The remarks made on this subject regarding G. barbadense (p. 272) 

 might be consulted. 



Selection of Stock. In the United States of America it has 

 practically become an accepted axiom that successful cotton-growing 

 imperatively involves the systematic selection and annual production 

 of special seed (see pp. 282-3). How far this first method (selection) 

 may be but the casual and accidental application of the principles in- 

 volved in the second (hybridisation), is a point that needs elucidation. 

 Selection may, at all events in the majority of instances, be charac- 

 terised as necessary to preserve the quality of existing stocks (see p. 

 30). In other words, with most cultivated cottons the tendency might 

 be spoken of as retrogressive, however fertile the soil or favourable 

 the climatic conditions (see pp. 147, 191, 199, etc). That is to say, there 

 is manifested a constant tendency to part with properties that may 

 be valued and to assume (from the cultivator's standpoint) lower or 

 degraded states. Such degeneration may, however, be witnessed as 

 being almost invariably towards certain manifestations that have 

 specific significations. Hence it may be accepted that selection alone 

 has not originated all the forms of cultivated cotton known in the world. 

 Thus G. arboreum, an admitted Asiatic species, has been carried, in 

 certain cultivated states, throughout the world, but wherever left to 

 run wild has invariably assumed or preserved in every detail the 

 specific or varietal characteristics (see pp. 98, 100, 102) even though 

 grown for a century or more under divergent climatic and soil 

 conditions to those of its original habitat. And this same story has 

 to be repeated for most species, none more conspicuously so than 

 G. brasiliense kidney cotton. Both in India and Africa that plant is 

 quite as frequently met with in a wild condition as in its ancestral 

 home in Brazil. Wherever found the kidneyed condition of the seed 



