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REVIEWS 



Balls's Cotton Plant in Egypt* 



The publication of Mr. Balls's book is of general interest in the 

 world of plant breeding, since it gives the results of a very exten- 

 sive series of experiments and represents one of the most general 

 and efificient attempts at placing the breeding of an important 

 crop plant on a Mendelian basis. Other investigators have done 

 more extensive and intensive work on particular phases of 

 Mendelism and on particular characters of other plants, but Balls 

 has carried through a much more general campaign in the applica- 

 tion of the Mendelian methods. The credit of the achievement 

 should be all the greater because the work has been done under 

 conditions that most investigators would consider very difficult. 

 While the temperatures of the Egyptian summer are not so 

 extreme as those that are encountered in our southwestern states, 

 "bur pioneer conditions afford in other respects a more favorable 

 atmosphere for experimental work than the vicinity of a large 

 oriental city like Cairo. 



Egypt might be described as a two-crop country, but the two 

 industries are entirely separate. The tourist crop comes in the 

 winter while cotton grows in the summer, when nobody stays 

 in Egypt who can get away. The investigations of ancient 

 remains, which have made Egypt so famous, are mostly con- 

 ducted in the winter. This explains why the tourist literature 

 of Egypt exceeds a thousand fold the cotton literature. But 

 Mr. Balls is a tireless investigator, and at last we have one book 

 about the Egyptian cotton that is not confined to statistics of 

 production or to agricultural generalities. 



That we do not get all that we might expect is no reason for 

 being ungrateful for many new facts and suggestions of improved 

 methods of investigation. It is in this latter field of methods 

 that the work of Balls seems likely to be most appreciated. 

 Certainly those who wish to employ all the physiological and 

 statistical expedients for the elaboration of biological data will 



*.The Cotton Plant in Egypt, Studies in Physiology and Genetics, by W. 

 Lawrence Balls, pp. 1-202, figs. 1-71. Published by MacMillan Co., 1912, price 

 I2.50. 



