COTTON 195 



establishing itself in the Salem and Coimbatore Districts 

 of the Madras Presidency; but sooner or later, no matter 

 what success was gained at first with it, the ultimate result 

 was failure. At the present moment there is no serious 

 cultivation of any tree cotton in India. 



Trials were not, however, restricted to tree cottons, 

 but many American and Egyptian annual varieties were 

 also introduced and tested, especially in the Southern 

 Mahratta country, where Upland Georgian and New 

 Orleans cottons were so successfully introduced as to 

 be looked upon now as indigenous; no higher class of 

 American type has been found capable of acclimatization. 

 The short season tracts without irrigation which prepon- 

 derate in India and the black soil districts also have been 

 found altogether unsuitable, and, so far as we can see 

 at present, the successful cultivation of American and 

 Egyptian annual cottons can only be conducted in the 

 irrigation colonies of Sind and the Punjab, and perhaps 

 in some parts of the United Provinces. 



In the southern parts of the Madras Presidency an 

 American type of cotton from Cambodia has been 

 successfully introduced, and this also grows fairly well 

 outside black soil areas where irrigation is practised. 



In some parts of the Central Provinces another cotton 

 of an Upland type has been introduced from Chota 

 Nagpur, where it has been under cultivation for about 

 a century. The area suitable for this cotton is restricted, 

 and its quality is too low to enable it to compete with 

 the product from America. 



While the systematic study of the Indian cottons was 

 in progress experiments were established with the 

 purpose of finding out how much improvement could be 

 effected in them by selection and hybridization. It was 

 found impossible to cross Indian with American varieties, 

 while all the Indian varieties could be easily hybridized. 

 The summary of the results gained by these methods will 

 be given separately for each Province. 



Bombay Presidency. 



In the Bombay Presidency there are four distinct 

 cotton tracts : 



