the Sugar-Cane in Spain. 259 
niards in their inclosed garden during the stay of Columbus 
in Hispaniola. ‘‘ Cannarum radices ex quarum succo saccha- 
rum extorquetur, sed non coagulatus succus, cwbitales cannas 
intra quindecim diem emiserunt.”’ (Decas J. lib. iti. P. Mar- 
tyr.) This extraordinary growth shews how rapidly the plant 
might be propagated in the West Indies; and had it been 
indigenous, what need was there of rearing it in their experi- 
mental garden ? 
We know, moreover, that the only plants mentioned by 
Columbus as growing in his New World that were known to 
him, were the pa/m and the pine. Had so valuable a product 
as the sugar-cane been found there, he would scarcely have 
omitted it. 
We have, moreover, the direct testimony of Antonio de 
Herrera, who is lauded by Robertson as the most faithful of 
the Spanish historians on the discovery of the New World, as 
to the importation of the sugar-cane. He states that its cul- 
tivation was first introduced in 1506 by a Spaniard named 
Aguilon, who brought it to the West Indies from the Canary 
Islands.* The experiment of Columbus had shewn the con- 
geniality of the climate to the rapid growth of the cane, and 
this was a natural consequence among a people then the most 
enterprizing in Europe. 
The other authorities cited by Labat are too distant from 
the period of the Spanish discoveries to decide the question 
respecting a plant so easily propagated ; and, besides, amount 
to no more than that the sugar-cane has been seen growing 
apparently without human care in America, in places and 
climates very similar to those regions where it is found wild 
in the eastern world, yet ~o¢ where Europeans had not before 
landed, and therefore might have introduced it. 
We have no certain data to fix the era of its first introduc- 
tion into Europe. Some writers ascribe it to the Crusades, 
but it certainly was known in the Morea, Rhodes, Malta, and 
Sicily before the Crusades. We know that it was extensively 
cultivated in Egypt, around Assuan, as early as the year 766 
* Historia general de los Hechos de los castillaiios in las Islas y Tierra 
Firma de mar oceano, Tom, i., p. 320, fol. Madrid, 1601. 
