14 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis. 



lima beans (Phaseolus lunafiis, or P. Pallar), and our com- 

 mon garden beans (Phaseohis vulgaris). 



At first I was quite struck to find garden beans, as it was 

 always thought that the garden beans, Phaseolus vulgaris, had 

 theii origin in the Old World. But Alphonse de CandoUe 

 had remarked in his Plant geography, that the garden bean 

 had no Sanskrit name and that the beans of the East In- 

 dies all belonged to other species with much smaller seeds, 

 as for instance, Phaseolus Mungo and Ph. radiatus. When 

 I received the beans through Messrs. Reiss and Stiibel 

 from South America, I had not yet seen the beans 

 from Los Muertos, Ariz., and of the cliff-dwellers whose 

 beans I saw at the Chicago Exposition in 1893. In study- 

 ing the old Spanish literature on America, I found that 

 the conquerors often speak of beans. Garcilasso de la Vega* 

 says of the Peruvians : ' ' They have also three or four kinds 

 of Frisoles, like our broad-beans but smaller " (the Spanish 

 broad-beans, Vicia Faha, are very large). Asa Gray and 

 Trumbull in The American Journal of Science, vol. xxv, 1883, 

 say that Jacques Cartier when he discovered the St. Lawrence 

 found the Indians cultivating corn and beans. Lawson in 

 his " Voyage to Carolina," 1700-1708, pp. 76, 77, says that 

 the kidney beans {Phaseolus vulgaris) were found very fre- 

 quently in maize-fields before the Englishman came. So I, 

 at first timidly later positively, declared that the garden beans 

 had their origin in America, which the American studies of 

 Indian languages have confirmed. 



The Ancient Greeks and Romans had the word Phaselos 

 or Phaseolus for bean, but I have often shown that it could 

 not have been our garden bean. Prof. Koernicke of Bonn 

 demonstrated that it was another genus, Dolichos sinensisy 

 the cow pea. 



I also found very large seeds of pumpkins, Cucurbita 

 maxima, and smaller ones, Cucurbita moschata. I proved 

 that also the pumpkins came from America and that the 

 squashes of the ancients were bottle-gourds, Lagenaria vul- 



p. 278 



Garcilasso de la "Vega, Commentar. reales, etc., 1 ed., p. 208; 2 ed., 



8. 



