CHAPTEE III 

 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BOLL: I. STRUCTURAL 



THE previous chapters have dealt with the origin of 

 cotton, and with the development of the plants from 

 seedlings to become the bearers of fruit. Reference can 

 be made to the Appendix for the methods of studying 

 the fruit itself, and the cotton formed therein. 



Those readers who are not interested in the ways by 

 which conclusions are obtained, but only in the conclu- 

 sions themselves, may take it for granted in the follow- 

 ing pages that, whenever a statement of fact is made, it 

 results from one of two methods either the observation 

 on which it is based has been repeated sufficiently often 

 to leave no reasonable doubt as to its truth, or (in the 

 case of numerical statements) the degree of uncertainty 

 attaching to the statement is exactly known and defin- 

 able. That some statements may be qualified by reserva- 

 tions does not imply that they are imagined to be incor- 

 rect. ^ 



Expressions of the author's personal opinion as formed 

 by deduction from the data are an entirely different 

 matter. These opinions about raw cotton run counter 

 to those generally accepted by previous writers, and, in 



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