PEA AND BEAN TRIBE 201 



beans are species of Vetch. The sweet bean-field furnishes us with a 

 pleasanter and more powerful odour than any other portion of our rural 

 landscape. The bean, Vicia faha, said to have' been introduced from Egypt, 

 aifords a large quantity of nutritious matter. The Windsor, Sandwich, and 

 other garden beans are but varieties of the field plant. The reasons why 

 Pythagoras forbade his disciples to eat the bean have led to many ingenious 

 speculations among learned men. "Some persons," says Professor Burnett, 

 " affirm that he believed the bean to be the retreat of the soul after death, 

 and there were many superstitions connected with the seed, which was by 

 some nations consecrated to the gods. Others suppose that the prohibition 

 was founded merely on sanitary principles, and that Pythagoras, like Hippo- 

 crates, considered that beans were unwholesome, and weakened the eyesight. 

 Even in our day it has been observed that mental alienations are more frequent 

 during the blossom of the bean than at other seasons ; a circumstance, how- 

 ever, explicable from the excessive summer heats that usually occur, and not 

 attributable to the bean, although its black flowers were supposed, by the 

 signature physicians, to be a prophetic mourning for the maladies to ensue. 

 Other commentators, however, and with more seeming probability, affirm 

 that when Pythagoras said ' abstain from beans,' he merely meant to restrict 

 his disciples from intermeddling in political affairs, for it is well known that 

 votes were formerly given by beans, and vestiges of this practice, at least in 

 words, remain with us at the present day." 



10. Smooth-podded Vetch {V. Icevigdta). — Flowers solitary, axillary, 

 nearly sessile ; calyx-teeth nearly equal, awl-shaped ; pods compressed, oblong, 

 and smooth ; stems ascending ; leaflets in about four pairs, smooth ; stipules 

 cloven, without spot. Plant perennial. This species is now lost from the 

 one spot in the world on which it formerly grew; but as, in some rare 

 instances, plants which had been considered as extinct from our Flora, have 

 again sprung up on our soil, it is not impossible that some future botanist 

 may find this. There are writers who consider it, however, but a variety of 

 the Rough-podded Yellow Vetch (F". lutea). The stem is from three or four 

 inches to a foot long, the flowers pale purple, the seeds brown and oblong. 

 The pebbly shore of Weymouth, in Dorsetshire, is the spot on which it 

 was found, its blossoms expanding in July and August. 



11. Hairy Tare {V. hirsuta). — Flowers about six together; pods hairy, 

 2-seeded ; leaflets linear, oblong, in six or eight pairs ; stipules half arrow- 

 shaped. Plant annual. This straggling slender plant, the Tine Tare, as it 

 is called in some counties, is very common in fields and hedges in England, 

 though rare in Scotland. Its much-branched stem and leaves make tangled 

 masses among the corn, and in June and July we may find its tiny bluish- 

 coloured flowers. This plant and the next, form the British genus Ervum of 

 some botanists, the name being said to have been derived from Erw, which 

 signifies in Celtic, tilled land ; and it is on such places that these little plants 

 are often very plentiful and troublesome. This Tine Tare will, in wet 

 seasons, sometimes destroy whole crops by entwining itself amongst them, 

 and hence the peasant often calls it Strangle Tare. It is not, however, a 

 useless plant in the hedge, for it is nutritive to cattle, and much relished by 

 them, and the birds feast on its little reddish seeds, which are dotted with 



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