98 THE DEVELOPMENT OF KAW COTTON 



of the lint from bolls opening on a certain day, we can 

 prophesy what will be the length of the lint in later bolls. 



Let us take the case of a flower opening on August 11, 

 which we have seen already was a day giving the young 

 fruit a chance to produce lint of good length. This would 

 probably be due to causes in addition to the recovery 

 from poisoning acting when it was about fifteen days 

 old, as the previous chapter indicated, and if we refer 

 to the diagram we shall find that when this boll was 

 eight days old the land was watered (on August 19). 

 Thus on August 19 to 25 we know that certain environ- 

 mental conditions existed which were favourable for lint 

 length development. 



It remains to see what effect these same conditions 

 produced on the thickness of the lint hair wall, affecting 

 the breaking strain. Such bolls as would receive the 

 most benefit from these optimal circumstances if such 

 were capable of acting equally on thickness as well as on 

 length would presumably be about thirty-eight days old 

 at the time. Bolls which were thirty-eight days old 

 about August 24 would have opened as dated flowers 

 about July 20. The flowers which opened about July 20 

 are seen in the diagram to have had nearly the 

 strongest lint hairs in the series. 



We can test the matter for every date examined by 

 shifting not merely the flowers of July 20 and August 1 1 

 into superposition, but by moving the whole curve of 

 lint length back through an interval of about twenty- 

 three days, as has teen done in Fig. 14. The two curves 

 are the same, when duly synchronized, excepting for 



