PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SEEDS. 823 



bronze. The species may have been introduced from 

 Italy. 



According to Theophrastus/ the inhabitants of Bac- 

 triana (the modern Bokkara) did not know the fakos of 

 the Greeks. Adolphe Pictet quotes a Persian name, 

 mangvb or margu, but he does not say whether it is an 

 ancient name, existing, for instance, in the Zend Avesta, 

 He admits several Sanskrit names for the lentil, Triasura, 

 renuka, mangcdyco, etc., while Anglo-Indian botanists, 

 Roxburgh and Piddington, knew none.^ As these 

 authors mention an analogous name in Hindustani and 

 Bengali, mussour, we may suppose that masura signifies 

 lentil, while mctngii in Persian recalls the other name 

 onangalya. As Roxburgh and Piddington give no name 

 in other Indian languages, it may be supposed that the 

 lentil was not known in this country before the invasion 

 of the Sanskrit-speaking race. Ancient Chinese works 

 do not mention the species; at least, Dr. Bretschneider 

 says nothing of them in his work published in 1870, nor 

 in the more detailed letters which he has since written 

 to me. 



The lentil appears to have existed in western tem- 

 perate Asia, in Greece, and in Italy, where its cultivation 

 was first undertaken in very early prehistoric time, when 

 it was introduced into Egypt. Its cultivation appears 

 to have been extended at a less remote epoch, but still 

 hardly in historic time, both east and west, that is into 

 Europe and India. 



Chick-Pea — Cicer arietinitm, Linnseus. 



Fifteen species of the genus Cicer are known, all of 

 Western Asia or Greece, except one, which is Abyssinian. 

 It seems, therefore, most probable that the cultivated 

 species comes from the tract of land lying between 

 Greece and the Himalayas, vaguely termed the East. 

 The species has not been found undoubtedly wild. All 

 the floras of the south of Europe, of Egypt, and of 

 Western Asia as far as the Caucasus and India, give it as 

 a cultivated species, or growing in fields and cultivated 



* Theophrastus, Hist., lib. iv. cap. 5. 



2 Roxburgh, Fl. Ind., edit. 1832, vol. iii. p. 324; Piddington, Iridex. 



