COMMERCIAL LINT 133 



general significance. It will be noticed that Ashmouni 

 (Target 9), the Upper Egypt variety, has a fairly com- 

 pact diagram; this is mainly due to the fact that it has 

 been comparatively isolated in Upper Egypt, and has 

 not been offered the same opportunities for admixture 

 as the Delta varieties ; at the same time it is by no 

 means pure, and in other respects such as lint colour 

 shows itself to be quite heterogeneous. The Delta variety 

 of Egyptian which has deteriorated least, according to the 

 spinners, is Yannovitch (Target 11), and the compact- 

 ness of its diagram confirms this. On the other hand, 

 Afifi (Target 12) has deteriorated very badly (according 

 to the same authorities), and its target diagram shows a 

 very wild scatter. Only one other variety is as wild, 

 namely, Assili (Target 8), which was only introduced in 

 1910, showing that it was not so pure as it was at first 

 claimed to be. In the case of this variety we can trace 

 the deterioration by target diagrams for the best com- 

 mercial seed of successive years (Targets 4 and 8), and 

 can watch the gradual obliteration of the " type group " 

 of dots by mixture and crossing with the outlying rogue 

 dots. Sakellaridis is another new variety, also not as 

 pure as it ought to be. 



These diagrams have been included to show that vari- 



Relative e ^ i m P ur ^y is a real difficulty, and not 



Importance merely the theoretical matter which it might 



of Seed and a pp ear to be. If a variety of cotton consists 

 Cultivation. ,_ 



of plants which, when growing side by side, 



produce lints differing in length by as much as half an 

 inch, it is waste of time to advise short-period pickings 



