- 15 -The Demand for Uniformity .—The demand for improvement is associated with the insistence that uniformity, regularity and fixity of type are the most important of all qualities both to growers and spinners.

"In all the qualities a spinner wants in cotton—namely, fineness and strength and length and adhesiveness, and colour and freedom from waste—in each and every case uniformity is essential, if the quahty is to be worth money. To be partly fine is to be coarse, to be partly strong is to be weak ; to be irregular in length or colour or anything else is to be so far poorer and less valuable. Also irregularity in plant habit is a certain bar to big production. Now I beUeve that this virtue of uniformity, this sine qua rum, mthout which no goodness is good, I beUev© that this is now for the first time in the history of cotton within reach of attainment. Uniformity can only be hoped for from plants that will breed pure. A pure plant may conceivably fail in uniformity, but without purity uniformity is inconceivable. Now it is well known to all students of cotton-growing from the work of Mr. Lawrence Balls in Egypt, and of others elsewhere, that it is possible to cultivate cotton on a commercial scale from pure parents . . . , I commend to all who are practically engaged in cotton breeding or cotton growing that purity should be their principal objective. Hitherto the whole character of the plant has been a chance entanglement of qualities, and improvement a nearly insoluble problem. When pure strains become generally available the processes of improvement in quality or in quantity, or of gradual modification in any desired direction, will become possible, and growers and spinners will both be benefited." (Ibid.)

The above considered statement of a leading fine-cotton spinner defines a problem with direct local application, not only to our cotton crop, but to every staple in actual cultivation or of possible introduction. Reports on samples of Sudan wheat bring to Ught the fact that every parcel included more than one variety of wheat with a consequent reduction in the market value. An attempt to isolate types revealed the same " entanglement of qualities " which characterises existing cotton crops. Improvement in the value, as distinct from the productivity, of our crops, can be secured neither by manuring, improved tillage, nor the field selection and cultivation of chance variations, or " sports," but only by the systematic application of approved scientific methods to what is necessarily a very difiicult problem. An example of the futility of haphazard choice of natural hybrids occurring in the field, has been afforded locally by the so-called " Makhsus " cotton, boomed some years ago in the Sudan. This field hybrid, which was somewhat extensively planted on its reputation for productivity, has since been abandoned after exhibiting all the irregularity and lack of uniformity which characterise uncontrolled hybridisation. The breeding-plot, the seed-plot and continuous and exhaustive field and laboratory observations afford the only means of combating the natural tendencies of all cottons to deteriorate. The good quahties of a cotton are either given to it by human agency, or, if occurring naturally, have to be isolated and fixed as a uniform character by the human agent.