THE VEGETABLES OF NEW YORK 



than those of garden peas and are never edible. The 

 seeds are angular or roundish and gray -brown, gray- 

 green, gray-yellow or speckled with dots of various 

 colors. The vines are trailing or less stiffly climbing 

 with strongly pigmented leaf-axils, are hardier to cold, 

 heat, and drouth and the seeds germinate at a lower 

 temperature than do those of garden peas. The seeds 

 of field peas may be used for human food but are usually 

 grown for farm animals and the vine is often cured for 

 forage. 



The descriptions given garden and field peas in the 

 preceding paragraphs are those assigned them in botani- 

 cal texts. As the varieties of the two groups are grown 

 in gardens and fields there is much overlapping of char- 

 acters: There are purple-blossomed garden peas (mostly 

 edible -podded ; dwarf field peas; and seeds and pods are, 

 in one or another character, mutually interchanged on 

 the vines of what probably when men domesticated them 

 were quite distinct types. Rogue plants, year in and 

 year out. hamper the work of seedsmen in their attempts 

 to keep varieties of the two peas true to type. Typical 

 plants of long-established varieties in both sub-species not 

 infrequently mutate and bring forth characters belonging 

 to the other group. One is led to suspect that either the 

 garden and field peas as delimited by the botanists have 

 been developed from one wild original; or, and much 

 more probable, the descendants of two original wild 

 plants have been many times hybridized in the process 

 of producing new varieties. 



As has been said, plants of the garden pea have 

 never been found wild. The converging evidence 

 of the several methods utilized in discovering and 

 proving the origin of species, however, seem certainly 

 to show that this sub-species of Pisum sativum had 

 its origin in eastern Europe and western Asia. To try 

 now to delimit the exact area in which it grew when men 

 first began to cultivate it would be speculation pure and 

 simple. It is possible that botanists may yet find it in 

 its wild habitation : or it may be that it is a modification 

 of the field pea, Pisum sativum arvense, with which 

 many experimenters have found that it readily crosses. 

 In that case the habitat was a vast area in southern 

 Russia and southern Europe where the field pea is said 

 still to grow wild. It is certain that the garden pea is 

 an early introduction in northern Europe and Asia and 

 as far west as England or east in China. 



The place of origin of the pea, however, is of small 

 importance. It is much more to the point to the culti- 

 vator to know that this vegetable has been grown by 

 man under artificial conditions for thousands of years 

 and to know how much the plant has been altered since 

 men first recorded it as a garden esculent. 



Pickering says: "Of culinary vegetables, Pisum 

 sativum is the only kind that can with certainty be 

 traced back to the Stone Age." 1 He does not give an 

 authority for the statement but presumably it came 

 from some one of the explorers of the Swiss lake villages 



of the Stone Age. His authority may have been Heer 

 for De Candolle says Heer found the garden pea among 

 the relics of the Stone Age at Morssedorf, Switzerland, 

 and also that the same explorer found it in the Bronze 

 Age in both Switzerland and Savoy.- At any rate, 

 almost certainly, the culture of the pea is prehistoric in 

 Europe. One may well assume that the cultivation of 

 peas and all related pulses came into cultivation among 

 the earliest of cultivated plants, — coevals of the flour- 

 yielding cereals. Certainly the pea offers many advan- 

 tages which all primitive men must have sought in wild 

 foods and they must have been disposed to cultivate 

 this vegetable in the first timid attempts at agriculture. 



In primitive ages hunters and graziers must have 

 used the edible seeds of wild pulses as a common source 

 of food supply. From the wild it is but a step to rude 

 cultivation, and the pulses must have been among the 

 most prominent of all esculents in early times for 

 artificial extension: The seed can be kept through 

 several seasons and carried far; the season of growth 

 is comparatively short; cultural requirements are not 

 difficult; they afford food as nourishing as any other 

 plants and for both men and animals; and, probably, 

 early cultivators observed that the pulses thrived on 

 fallow ground, soils too poor for cereals. No doubt 

 these regions and periods were in the Stone and Bronze 

 ages when scarcity of animals forced a meatless diet, 

 times when the pea and related pulses, rich in protein, 

 must have become as now in vast areas of the Old World 

 chief substitutes for meats and fats; must have been 

 necessities without which the human race might easily 

 have perished from the earth. 



De Candolle writes that there is no indication of 

 the cultivation of garden peas in ancient India or Egypt; 

 but Sturtevant says the pea in India goes back to a 

 remote period as shown by its Sanscrit name, and that 

 the discovery of its seed in a tomb at Thebes proves it 

 to have been an ancient Egyptian plant.' Sturtevant 

 does not give authorities for the two statements. 

 Gibault, without citation, gives Piddington as an 

 authority who believed the pea was cultivated in ancient 

 India under the Sanscrit name harenso as well as under 

 several other names. 4 De Candolle thinks Piddington 

 refers to modern and not to ancient India.' It does 

 not seem from available evidence that there is proof of 

 several statements found in the histories of plants that 

 this pea was cultivated in early times in India. 



Nor does there seem to be probability that the 

 species early cultivated in Egypt was Pisum sativum 

 var. hortense or var. arvense. Pisum sativum 

 eiatius grows spontaneously and is more or less culti- 

 vated in Egypt, and probably it was this pea that was 

 found in the tombs at Thebes, as it has been in recent 

 years in other tombs in the delta of the Nile. Truth is, 

 in all reports of discoveries of the pea in ancient places, 

 whether through the finding of seeds in ruins, or by 

 application of names from the dead languages, it is 



^ckering. C. Chron. Hist. Pis. 451. 1879. - De Candolle, A. Orig. Cult. Pis. 329. 1882. 



on Edible Plan t- 441. 1919. ' Gibault, C. Hist. Leg. 343. 1912. Ibid. 330. 



Sturtevant's Notes 



