318 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



to discover its origin. We must have recourse to the 

 history of its cultivation and to the names of the species 

 to find out the country in which it was originally 

 indigenous. 



We must first eliminate an error which came from a 

 wrong interpretation of Chinese works. Stanislas Julien 

 believed that the bean was one of the five plants which 

 the Emperor Chin-nong commanded; 4600 years ago, to 

 be sown every year with great solemnity.^ Now, accord- 

 ing to Dr. Bretschneider,^ who is surrounded at Pekin 

 with every possible resource for arriving at the truth, the 

 seed similar to a bean which the emperors sow in the 

 enjoined ceremony is that of Bolichos soja, and the bean 

 was only introduced into China from Western Asia a 

 century before the Christian era, at the time of Chang- 

 kien's embassy. Thus falls an assertion which it is hard 

 to reconcile with other facts, for instance with the 

 absence of an ancient cultivation of the bean in India, 

 and of a Sanskrit name, or even of any modern Indian 

 name. 



The ancient Greeks were acquainted with the bean, 

 which they called kuamos, and sometimes TcvMinos 

 ellenikos, to distinguish it from that of Egypt, which was 

 the seed of a totally different aquatic species, Nelv/m- 

 bium. The Iliad^ already mentions the bean as a culti- 

 vated plant, and Virchow found some beans in the 

 excavations at Troy.* The Latins called it faba. : We 

 find nothing in the works of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, 

 Pliny, etc., which leads us to believe the plant indigenous 

 in Greece or Italy. It was early known, because it was 

 an ancient Roman rite to put beans in the sacrifices, to 

 the goddess Carna, whence the name Fabarice Calendce.^ 

 The Fabii perhaps took their name from faba, and the 

 twelfth chapter of the eighteenth book of Pliny shows, 

 without the possibility of a doubt, the antiquity and 

 importance of the bean in Italy. 



' Loisoleur Deslongohamps, Consid. sur les CMales, part i. p. 29. 



' Bretsohneider, Study and, Value, etc., pp. 7, 15. 



8 Iliad, 13, V. 589. 



* Wittmaok, Sitz. hericht Vereins, Brandenburg, 1870. 



' Novitius Dictionnarium, at the word Faba. 



