PLANTS CULTIVATED FOE THEIE SEEDS. 419 



Nutmeg — Myristica fragrans, Houttuyn. 



The nutmeg, a little tree of the order MyristicecB, is 

 wild in the Moluccas, principally in the Banda Islands.^ 

 It has long been cultivated there, to judge from the 

 considerable number of its varieties. Europeans have 

 received the nutmeg by the Asiatic trade since the 

 Middle Ages, but the Dutch long possessed the monopoly 

 of its cultivation. When the English owned the 

 Moluccas at the end of the last century, they carried 

 live nutmeg trees to Bencoolen and into Prince Edward's 

 Islands.^ It afterwards spread to Bourbon, Mauritius, 

 Madagascar, and into some of the colonies of tropical 

 America, but with indifferent success from a commercial 

 point of view. 



Seaa,me-^Sesa7niJt/m indiev/m, de CandoUe ; S. ind/icfwm 

 and S. orientale, Linnaeus. 



Sesame has long been cultivated in the hot regions 

 of the old world for the sake of the oil extracted from 

 the seeds. 



The order Pedalinece to which this annual belongs 

 is composed of several genera distributed through the 

 tropical paris of Asia, Africa, and America. Each genus 

 has only a small number of species. Sesamum, in the 

 widest sense of the name,* has ten, all African except 

 perhaps the cultivated species whose origin we are about 

 to seek. The latter forms alone the true genus Sesamum, 

 which is a section in Bentham and Hooker's work. 

 Botanical analogy points to an African origin, but the 

 area of a considerable number of plants is known to 

 extend from the south of Asia into Africa. Sesame has 

 two races, the one with black, the other with white seed, 

 and several varieties differing in the shape of the leaf. 

 The difference in the colour of the seeds is very ancient, 

 as in the case of the poppy. . 



The seeds of sesame often sow themselves outside 

 plantations, and more or less naturalize the species. This 

 has been observed in regions very remote one from the 



» Knmphins, Amboin., ii. p. 17 ; Blume, mimphiai i. p. 180. 



* Boxburgh, Fl. Indica, iii. p. 845. __ 



S Bentham and Hooker, Genera PL, n. p. lUo». 



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