120 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 



At the next meeting, spring planting, flowers, etc., will be 

 discussed, and domestic wines will also be continued. 

 The club adjourned to next Monday. 



H. MEIGS, Secretary. 



May 21, 1860. 



Present — 46 members. 



Mr. John G. Bergen in the chair. 



The Secretary, Judge Meigs, read a number of papers, trans- 

 lated from late Paris journals, and others, of which we make the 

 following notes : 



THE BEAN. 



The following is translated from the Societe D' Horticulture, 

 for May, 1860. 



"M. Georges de Martens, of Germany, has published this year, 

 at Stuttgart, in German, a quarto volume of 92 pages, with 12 

 colored plates of beans. He has studied the subject profoundly, 

 and rendered great service by removing doubts and difficulties 

 for the benefit of the world. Unhappily for us (France) it is in 

 Geman, so that the greater number of our gardeners and farmers 

 cannot read it. Our committee on publication deemed it a ser- 

 vice to France to make the following analysis of his work : 



"The greater part of our plants and animals, domesticated, 

 have no wild ones like them, and so it is with the bean. Theo- 

 phrastus, in the fourth century before our Savior, is the first 

 who speaks of it. It is admitted that the Greeks obtained it 

 from India about the same time they did rice, on the return of 

 the army of Alexander the Great. De Candolle doubted this 

 origin from India because our garden bean has no name in the 

 Sanscrit — and Rogle, in his Legumina, does not speak of it as 

 cultivated in India, but only in Cashmir ; but there is a passage 

 in the lUiad, where Homer says the Greeks cultivated it. It was 

 late in reaching Italy. Neither Cato nor Yarro knew anything 

 of it. A doubtful mention of it occurs in Virgil, Georgics 1, 

 line 227. Columella, later mentions it as Fasellus, &c. The 

 bean reached Great Britain in 1597. 



" Capt. Gosnold brought it to America at Elizabeth Island on 

 the coast of Massachusetts in 1602. It reached New York in 

 1644, and Virginia in 1648." 



