THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DISTANT LANDS 71 



the English. Of smaller but considerable importance 

 was the introduction of new food-plants to Europe. On 

 the other hand the discovery of a sea-route to India did 

 little more at first than to throw a profitable foreign 

 trade into the hands successively of the Portuguese, the 

 Spaniards, the Dutch and the English. The conquest 

 of America at once began to enlarge the bounds of 

 natural history, but it was long before really valuable 

 knowledge of this sort was brought from Asia. Magel- 

 lan and his companions were able to see with their own 

 eyes the nutmeg-tree and the clove-tree of the Moluccas, 

 the camphor-tree of Borneo, cinnamon-trees, ginger, 

 sago-palms and bananas. A little later Garcias ab 

 Horto and his pupil Christobal Acosta wrote treatises 

 on the drugs of India, but it was not till the seventeenth 

 and eighteenth centuries that the Dutch naturalists 

 began to publish methodical treatises on the natural 

 history of India and the Malay archipelago, while the 

 British contributions are of still more modern date. 



The new food-plants brought over from America 

 (potato, maize, Jerusalem artichoke and probably the 

 haricot^) made a very important addition to the 

 resources of Europe. From America too came many 

 ornamental plants, capable of cultivation in our gardens. 

 A few tropical species from Brazil, Peru, Chili or the 

 West Indies, were cultivated in European greenhouses, 

 which were however rare and costly luxuries till the 

 eighteenth century was far advanced ; among these the 

 passion-flower and the sensitive plant excited particular 

 interest. But for nearly three hundred years hardly 

 any plants from the Far East were cultivated in Europe. 



1 The origin of the French bean and the scarlet runner, which are both 

 haricots, has not been fully cleared up. See De CandoUe's Cultivated Plants. 



