122 



Food-Grains of India. 



The Order Leguminosse is the second largest Order of 

 flowering plants : it contains between 6,000 and 7,000 species. 

 A conspectus of the tribes and genera of this Order— so far as 

 the plants described in the following pages are concerned — is 

 here given : 



The sequence in which the several kinds of Indian pulse are 

 arranged and described in the following pages is that indicated 

 in the above table, except that a few species, chiefly belonging 

 to Mucuna, Psophocarpus, and Tamarindus, are relegated to the 

 closing paragraphs of the present part of the work, because no 

 detailed chemical analyses of these plants have been made. 



In classifying the several species of pulse according to their 

 chemical composition, the most useful plan to follow is one based 

 on their relative richness in albuminoids, or rather on the value 

 of their nutrient-ratios, that is, the proportion between their 

 albuminoids and their starch, reckoning, however, with their 

 starch, the starch-equivalent of the oil they contain. In the 

 following table the first column of figures gives the above-named 

 nutrient-ratio ; the second column the percentage of albuminoids ; 



