STRUCTURE OF THE BOLL 57 



The amount of copying which has taken place may be 

 realized by the fate of a rough sketch of the ovary which 

 first appeared in the 1881 edition of Bowman, and has 

 returned to England again in Matthews' work dated 

 1904, where it is acknowledged as being derived from a 

 German book by Witt. 



To deal in detail with the various misstatements which 

 have thus been passed from hand to hand, would take 



Cause of ^ muc ^ L ti me > an d would, moreover, be 



Former scarcely courteous to the original work of 



Errors. j) r Bowman. One point alone requires 



notice namely, the cause of the origination of many 



of these mistakes. 



The developing boll grows to its full external dimen- 

 sions in the first half of its maturation period. Thence- 

 forward its external appearance remains unchanged, so 

 that unless flowers are labelled with their dates in field- 

 crop, the microscopist wll be confused by finding different 

 stages inside bolls which appear externally to be fully de- 

 veloped and ready to open. The confusion thus intro- 

 duced has been accentuated by the use of greenhouse 

 plants grown in England, instead of normal plants grown 

 in cotton-field's. The study of the abnormalities shown in 

 the former conditions is a separate subject for research 

 in itself. The truth of this criticism is demonstrated very 

 well by Fig. 34 in the 1908 edition of Bowman, where 

 five bolls are figured as ten, twenty, thirty, forty, and 

 sixty days old, respectively. Of these, the twenty and 

 forty day bolls are typical of what the Egyptian calls 

 t; nabroon," or a stunted condition due to premature 



