ENVIRONMENT OF THE BOLL 



89 



will be uncertainty respecting the young bolls if we group 

 them by the date of boll-opening. For very accurate 

 purposes the flowers should be dated, and only those 

 bolls which had ripened from them at the average matura- 

 tion interval should be picked . This would mean lab elling 

 about five times as many flowers as were actually used, 

 apart from those lost through normal shedding. 



In these two series the author employed flower-labelling 

 for the first series, and daily picking for the second. The 

 first series was more closely directed to the study of lint 

 length, and the second to the study of lint strength. The 

 second method, moreover, accords with the actual field 

 practice. 



That a real difference, though a slight one, exists as between 

 the two methods may be seen by examining the following 

 table, which shows the " variability " of lint length from 

 bolls which were all of the same nominal age, as determined by 

 the two methods, taking sixty-three seeds in each case, and 

 measuring the length on each in millimetres. 



The lengths are much more irregular in the second case, 

 simply because we have included (under the same nominal age- 

 designation) bolls which were not of the same age when the 

 lint length was being determined, whereas in the first case 

 our grouping is not likely to be more than a day wrong either 

 way in this respect . 



