12 SCIENCE 
sible to use the roller gins with which the Sea 
Island growers are already equipped. The 
only difficulty arises from the fact that the 
Meade seeds average somewhat larger than the 
Sea Island, but this can be avoided by a slight 
modification of the ginning equipment. 
Another consequence of the larger size of the 
seeds is that the percentage of lint is lower 
than with some of the Sea Island varieties, al- 
though the lint index, the number of grams of 
lint produced by 100 seeds, is higher. Thus a 
sample of Meade cotton with a lint percentage 
of 26.6 had a lint index of 5.45, while Sea Is- 
land cotton with a percentage of 30.7 had an 
index of 4.93. In‘addition to producing more 
lint per acre the Meade cotton produces more 
seed than the Sea Island, the increase being 
at the rate of about 250 pounds of seed for 
each 500-pound bale. In such eases the popu- 
lar idea of the supreme importance of the lint 
percentage is clearly erroneous. 
That the Meade variety was not produced by 
hybridization, but by the discovery and 
selection of a superior type already existing, 
is of interest in relation to heredity. Con- 
fusion is likely to arise, as already shown by 
unauthorized statements appearing in news- 
papers and agricultural journals, in which the 
Meade variety appears as a new early Sea 
Island cotton or as a hybrid between the Up- 
land and Sea Island types. The usual reason- 
ing in such matters is to assume that a va- 
riety like Meade must be a hybrid because 
the plant is like Upland cotton and the lint 
like Sea Island, but the uniformity of the 
Meade cotton at once places it in a different 
class from any stock known to have a direct 
hybrid origin. 
The need of combining the superior fiber of 
the Sea Island or Egyptian types of cotton 
with the superior cultural characters of the 
Upland type has appealed strongly to breeders, 
and many attempts have been made to secure 
this result by hybridizing different Upland va- 
rieties with Sea Island or Egyptian sorts. 
Crossing is readily accomplished and the re- 
sults usually appear promising in the first and 
second generations. - Thousands of natural and 
artificial hybrids have been raised, compared, 
[N. S. Vou. XLVIII. No. 1227 
and selected, and progenies of such hybrids 
have been carried through numerous genera- 
tions, but without finding any hybrid stock 
with a sufficiently uniform and stable combina- 
tion of the desirable characters of the parental 
types to justify commercial planting. While 
it is doubtless true that need of uniformity 
is greater with cotton than with many other 
crops, on account of the industrial uses of the 
fiber, the failure to secure sufiiciently stable 
combinations of characters from hybrids be- 
tween widely different types may be significant. 
O. F. Coox 
BUREAU OF PLANT INDUSTRY, 
U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
INTERNATIONAL ZOOLOGY AND THE INTER- 
NATIONAL CODE 
Discussion of the famous Piltdown jaw has 
developed one of the best examples imaginable 
of evil due to a disregard for established rules 
of zoological nomenclature. The great inter- 
est shown in this specimen by men other than 
professional zoologists makes the case a par- 
ticularly good one on which to base an earnest 
plea for universal use of the International 
Code without restrictions and evasions. Three 
comparatively late papers on the Piltdown re- 
mains are enough to cite in the present con- 
nection. 
Miller,t in describing the jaw as the type 
specimen of a new species of extinct chimpan- 
zee, called it Pan vetus. Pycraft,2 in a totally 
adverse reply to Miller, attempts to set his 
readers straight in matters of nomenclature 
by the statement that ‘when Mr. Miller speaks 
of the genus Pan he means the genus Sima.” 
Boule’ in a review of Miller’s paper in which 
he agrees with that author in every detail ex- 
cept nomenclature, uses for the chimpanzee 
the generic name Troglodytes.* 
1 Smithsonian Mise. Coll., Vol. 65, No. 12, No- 
vember 24, 1915. 
2 Science Progress, No. 43, pp. 389-409, January, 
LOH 
3 L’ Anthropologie, Vol. 28, pp. 483-435, July— 
October, 1917. 
4More expansive than Pyeraft, he explains as 
follows: ‘‘Pour ceux de mes lecteurs qui ne serai- 
