PEDIGREE 19 



In concluding this chapter, it may te useful to point 

 out a few of the revised ideas which the isolation and 

 study of pure strains have introduced into 

 the cotton trade. Perhaps it would be 

 more correct to say " will introduce," for 

 the disposition to regard cotton-plants and varieties as 

 capable of reasonable behaviour has yet to be manifested. 

 In the first place, the greater part of this book is 

 occupied by results which could not have been obtained, 

 in their present form, on a mixed commercial 

 variety. One experiment describes the 

 steady oscillation in length of lint between 34 and 31 milli- 

 metres (seed-combed length); the most uniform com- 

 mercial variety in Egypt contains plants which range 

 from 25 to 33 millimetres on the same day (p. 134, 

 Target 11); so that such slight changes as an eighth of an 

 inch (3-1 mm.) are almost entirely obscured, unless an 

 intolerable amount of additional labour is expended in 

 accumulating data so as to smooth .out these consti- 

 tutional differences between plant and plant. 



Again, cotton has for generations been held up to 

 censure and admiration alternately as the most " vari- 

 able " of organisms, capable of being moulded 



f C t lty * nt an y ^ orm ' an( * e( l ua % incapable of re- 

 taining it. This opinion has had to go by 

 the board, with the progressive analysis of the phe- 

 nomena into such constituents as those outlined in this 

 book, and the plant is now known to be no more variable 

 than any other, and equally controllable. Two pure 

 strains of cotton grown by the writer may be cited : one 



