Origin of Cultivated Plants

CHAPTER V.

PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SEEDS

Cacao—Theobroma Cacao, Linnæus.

The genus Theobroma, of the order Byttneriaceæ, allied to the Malvaceæ, consists of fifteen to eighteen species, all belonging to tropical America, principally in the hotter parts of Brazil, Guiana, and Central America.

The common cacao, Theobroma Cacao, is a small tree wild in the forests of the Amazon and Orinoco basins1564 and of their tributaries up to four hundred feet of altitude. It is also said to grow wild in Trinidad, which lies near the mouth of the Orinoco.1565 I find no proof that it is indigenous in Guiana, although it seems probable. Many early writers indicate that it was both wild and cultivated at the time of the discovery of America from Panama to Guatemala and Campeachy; but from the numerous quotations collected by Sloane,1566 it is to be feared that its wild character was not sufficiently verified. Modern botanists are not very explicit on this head, and in general they only mention the cacao as cultivated in these regions and in the West India Islands. G. Bernoulli,1567 who had resided in Guatemala, only says, “wild and cultivated throughout tropical America;” and Hemsley,1568 in his review of the plants of Mexico and Central America, made in 1879 from the rich materials of the Kew herbarium, gives no locality where the species is indigenous. It was perhaps introduced into Central America and into the warm regions of Mexico by the Indians before the discovery of America. Cultivation may have naturalized it here and there, as is said to be the case in Jamaica.1569 In support of this hypothesis, it must be observed that Triana1570 indicates the cacao as only cultivated in the warm regions of New Granada, a country situated between Panama and the Orinoco valley.

However this may be, the species was grown in Central America and Yucatan at the time of the discovery of America. The seeds were sent into the highlands of Mexico, and were even used as money, so highly were they valued. The custom of drinking chocolate was general. The name of this excellent drink is Mexican. The Spaniards carried the cacao from Acapulco to the Philippine Isles in 1674 and 1680,1571 where it succeeded wonderfully. It is also cultivated in the Sunda Isles. I imagine it would succeed on the Guinea and Zanzibar coasts, but it is of no use to attempt to grow it in countries which are not very hot and very damp.

Another species, Theobroma bicolor, Humboldt and Bonpland, is found growing with the common cacao in American plantations. It is not so much prized. On the other hand, it does not require so high a temperature, and can live at an altitude of nearly three thousand feet in the valley of the Magdalena. It abounds in a wild state in New Granada.1572 Bernoulli asserts that it is only cultivated in Guatemala, though the inhabitants call it mountain cacao.

Litchi—Nephelium Litchi, Cambessides.

The seed of this species and of the two following is covered with a fleshy excrescence, very sweet and scented, which is eaten with tea.

Like most of the Sapindaceæ, the nepheliums are trees. This one has been cultivated in the south of China, India, and the Malay Archipelago from a date of which we cannot be certain. Chinese authors living at Pekin only knew the Litchi late in the third century of our era.1573 Its introduction into Bengal took place at the end of the eighteenth century.1574 Every one admits that the species is a native of the south of China, and, Blume1575 adds, of Cochin-China and the Philippine Isles, but it does not seem that any botanist has found it in a truly wild state. This is probably because the southern part of China towards Siam has been little visited. In Cochin-China and in Burmah and at Chittagong the Litchi is only cultivated.1576

Longan—Nephelium longana, Cambessides.

This second species, very often cultivated in Southern Asia, like the Litchi, is wild in British India, from Ceylon and Concan as far as the mountains to the east of Bengal, and in Pegu.1577 The Chinese introduced it into the Malay Archipelago some centuries ago.

Rambutan—Nephelium lappaceum, Linnæus.

It is said to be wild in the Indian Archipelago, where it must have been long cultivated, to judge from the number of its varieties. A Malay name, given by Blume, signifies wild tree. Loureiro says it is wild in Cochin-China and Java. Yet I find no confirmation for Cochin-China in modern works, nor even for the islands. The new flora of British India1578 indicates it at Singapore and Malacca without affirming that it is indigenous, on which head the labels in herbaria commonly tell us nothing. Certainly the species is not wild on the continent of Asia, in spite of the vague expressions of Blume and Miquel,1579 but it is more probably a native of the Malay Archipelago.

In spite of the reputation of the nepheliums, of which the fruit can be exported, it does not appear that these trees have been introduced into the tropical colonies of Africa and America except into a few gardens as curiosities.

Pistachio Nut—Pistacia vera, Linnæus.

The pistachio, a shrub belonging to the order Anacardiaceæ, grows naturally in Syria. Boissier1580 found it to the north of Damascus in Anti-Lebanon, and he saw specimens of it brought from Mesopotamia, but he could not be sure that they were found wild. There is the same doubt about branches gathered in Arabia, which have been mentioned by some writers. Pliny and Galen1581 knew that the species was a Syrian one. The former tells us that the plant was introduced into Italy by Vitellius at the end of the reign of Tiberius, and thence into Spain by Flavius Pompeius.

There is no reason to believe that the cultivation of the pistachio was ancient even in its primitive country, but it is practised in our own day in the East, as well as in Sicily and Tunis. In the south of France and Spain it is of little importance.

Broad Bean—Faba vulgaris, Mœnch; Vicia faba, Linnæus.

Linnæus, in his best descriptive work, Hortus cliffortianus, admits that the origin of this species is obscure, like that of most plants of ancient cultivation. Later, in his Species, which is more often quoted, he says, without giving any proof, that the bean “inhabits Egypt.” Lerche, a Russian traveller at the end of the last century, found it wild in the Mungan desert of the Mazanderan, to the south of the Caspian Sea.1582 Travellers who have collected in this region have sometimes come across it,1583 but they do not mention it in their writings,1584 excepting Ledebour,1585 and the quotation on which he relies is not correct. Bosc1586 says that Olivier found the bean wild in Persia; I do not find this confirmed in Olivier’s Voyage, and as a rule Bosc seems to have been too ready to believe that Olivier found a good many of our cultivated plants in the interior of Persia. He says it of buckwheat and of oats, which Olivier does not mention.

The only indication besides that of Lerche which I find in floras is a very different locality. Munby mentions the bean as wild in Algeria, at Oran. He adds that it is rare. No other author, to my knowledge, has spoken of it in northern Africa. Cosson, who knows the flora of Algeria better than any one, assures me he has not seen or received any specimen of the wild bean from the north of Africa. I have ascertained that there is no specimen in Munby’s1587 herbarium, now at Kew. As the Arabs grow the bean on a large scale, it may perhaps be met with accidentally outside cultivated plots. It must not be forgotten, however, that Pliny (lib. xviii. c. 12) speaks of a wild bean in Mauritania, but he adds that it is hard and cannot be cooked, which throws doubt upon the species. Botanists who have written upon Egypt and Cyrenaïca, especially the more recent,1588 give the bean as cultivated.

This plant alone constitutes the genus Faba. We cannot, therefore, call in the aid of any botanical analogy 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.1589 Now, according to Dr. Bretschneider,1590 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 Dolichos soja, and the bean was only introduced into China from Western Asia a century before the Christian era, at the time of Changkien’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 kuamos ellenikos, to distinguish it from that of Egypt, which was the seed of a totally different aquatic species, Nelumbium. The Iliad1591 already mentions the bean as a cultivated plant, and Virchow found some beans in the excavations at Troy.1592 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 Fabariæ Calendæ.1593 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.

The word faba recurs in several of the Aryan languages of Europe, but with modifications which philologists alone can recognize. We must not forget, however, Adolphe Pictet’s very just remark,1594 that in the cases of the seeds of cereals and leguminous plants the names of one species are often transferred to another, or that certain names were sometimes specific and sometimes generic. Several seeds of like form were called kuamos by the Greeks; several different kinds of haricot bean (Phaseolus, Dolichos) bear the same name in Sanskrit, and faba in ancient Slav, bobu in ancient Prussian, babo in Armorican, fav, etc., may very well have been used for peas, haricot beans, etc. In our own day the phrase coffee-bean is used in the trade. It has been rightly supposed that when Pliny speaks of fabariæ islands, where beans were found in abundance, he alludes to a species of wild pea called botanically Pisum maritimum.

The ancient inhabitants of Switzerland and of Italy in the age of bronze cultivated a small-fruited variety of Faba vulgaris.1595 Heer calls it Celtica nana, because it is only six to nine millimetres long, whereas our modern field bean is ten to twelve millimetres. He has compared the specimens from Montelier on Lake Morat, and St. Peter’s Islands on Lake Bienne, with others of the same epoch from Parma. Mortellet found, in the contemporary lake-dwellings on the Lake Bourget, the same small bean, which is, he says, very like a variety cultivated in Spain at the present day.1596

The bean was cultivated by the ancient Egyptians.1597 It is true that hitherto no beans have been found in the sarcophagi, or drawings of the plant seen on the monuments. The reason is said to be that the plant was reckoned unclean.1598 Herodotus1599 says, “The Egyptians never sow the bean in their land, and if it grows they do not eat it either cooked or raw. The priests cannot even endure the sight of it; they imagine that this vegetable is unclean.” The bean existed then in Egypt, and probably in cultivated places, for the soil which would suit it was as a rule under cultivation. Perhaps the poor population and that of certain districts did not share the prejudices of the priests; we know that the superstitions varied with the nomes. Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus mention the cultivation of the bean in Egypt, but they wrote five hundred years later than Herodotus.

The word pol occurs twice in the Old Testament;1600 it has been translated bean because of the traditions preserved by the Talmud, and of the Arabic name foul, fol, or ful, which is that of the bean. The first of the two verses shows that the Hebrews were acquainted with the bean one thousand years before Christ.

Lastly, I shall mention a sign of the ancient existence of the bean in the north of Africa. This is the Berber name ibiou, in the plural iabouen, used by the Kabyles of the province of Algiers.1601 It has no resemblance to the Semitic name, and dates perhaps from a remote antiquity. The Berbers formerly inhabited Mauritania, where Pliny asserts that the species was wild. It is not known whether the Guanchos (the Berber people of the Canaries) knew the bean. I doubt whether the Iberians had it, for their supposed descendants, the Basques, use the name baba,1602 answering to the Roman faba.

We judge from these facts that the bean was cultivated in Europe in prehistoric terms. It was introduced into Europe probably by the western Aryans at the time of their earliest migrations (Pelasgians, Kelts, Slavs). It was taken to China later, a century before the Christian era, and still later into Japan, and quite recently into India.

Its wild habitat was probably twofold some thousands of years ago, one of the centres being to the south of the Caspian, the other in the north of Africa. This kind of area, which I have called disjunctive, and to which I formerly paid a good deal of attention,1603 is rare in dicotyledons, but there are examples in those very countries of which I have just spoken.1604 It is probable that the area of the bean has long been in process of diminution and of extinction. The nature of the plant is in favour of this hypothesis, for its seed has no means of dispersing itself, and rodents or other animals can easily make prey of it. Its area in Western Asia was probably less limited at one time, and that in Africa in Pliny’s day was more or less extensive. The struggle for existence which was going against this plant, as against maize, would have gradually isolated it and caused it to disappear, if man had not saved it by cultivation.

The plant which most nearly resembles the bean is Vicia narbonensis. Authors who do not admit the genus Faba, of which the characters are not very distinct from those of Vicia, place these two species in the same section. Now, Vicia narbonensis is wild in the Mediterranean basin and in the East as far as the Caucasus, in the north of Persia, and in Mesopotamia.1605 Its area is continuous, but this renders the hypothesis I mentioned above probable by analogy.

Lentil—Ervum lens, Linnæus; Lens esculenta, Mœnch.

The plants which most nearly resemble the lentil are classed by authors now in the genus Ervum, now in a distinct genus Lens, and sometimes in the genus Cicer; but the species of these ill-defined groups all belong to the Mediterranean basin or to Western Asia. This throws some light on the origin of the cultivated plant. Unfortunately, the lentil is no longer to be found in a wild state, at least with certainty. The floras of the south of Europe, of Northern Africa, of the East, and of India always mention it as cultivated, or as growing in fields after or with other cultivated species. A botanist1606 saw it in the provinces to the south of the Caucasus, “cultivated and nearly wild here and there round villages.” Another1607 indicates it vaguely in the south of Russia, but more recent floras fail to confirm this.

The history and names of this plant may give clearer indications of its origin. It has been cultivated in the East, in the Mediterranean basin and even in Switzerland, from prehistoric time. According to Herodotos, Theophrastus, etc., the ancient Egyptians used it largely. If their monuments give no proof of this, it was probably because the lentil was, like the bean, considered common and coarse. The Old Testament mentions it three times, by the name adaschum or adaschim, which must certainly mean lentil, for the Arabic name is ads,1608 or adas.1609 The red colour of Esau’s famous mess of pottage has not been understood by most authors. Reynier,1610 who had lived in Egypt, confirms the explanation given formerly by Josephus; the lentils were red because they were hulled. It is still the practice in Egypt, says Reynier, to remove the husk or outer skin from the lentil, and in this case they are a pale red. The Berbers have the Semitic name adès for the lentil.1611

The Greeks cultivated the species —fakos or fakai. Aristophanes mentions it as an article of food of the poor.1612 The Latins called it lens, a name whose origin is unknown, which is evidently allied to the ancient Slav lesha, Illyrian lechja, Lithuanian lenszic.1613 The difference between the Greek and Latin names shows that the species perhaps existed in Greece and Italy before it was cultivated. Another proof of ancient existence in Europe is the discovery of lentils in the lake-dwellings of St. Peter’s Island, Lake of Bienne,1614 which are of the age of bronze. The species may have been introduced from Italy.

According to Theophrastus,1615 the inhabitants of Bactriana (the modern Bokkara) did not know the fakos of the Greeks. Adolphe Pictet quotes a Persian name, mangu or margu, but he does not say whether it is an ancient name, existing, for instance, in the Zend Avesta. He admits several Sanskrit names for the lentil, masura, renuka, mangalya, etc., while Anglo-Indian botanists, Roxburgh and Piddington, knew none.1616 As these authors mention an analogous name in Hindustani and Bengali, mussour, we may suppose that masura signifies lentil, while mangu in Persian recalls the other name mangalya. As Roxburgh and Piddington give no name in other Indian languages, it may be supposed that the lentil was not known in this country before the invasion of the Sanskrit-speaking race. Ancient Chinese works do not mention the species; at least, Dr. Bretschneider says nothing of them in his work published in 1870, nor in the more detailed letters which he has since written to me.

The lentil appears to have existed in western temperate Asia, in Greece, and in Italy, where its cultivation was first undertaken in very early prehistoric time, when it was introduced into Egypt. Its cultivation appears to have been extended at a less remote epoch, but still hardly in historic time, both east and west, that is into Europe and India.

Chick-Pea—Cicer arietinum, Linnæus.

Fifteen species of the genus Cicer are known, all of Western Asia or Greece, except one, which is Abyssinian. It seems, therefore, most probable that the cultivated species comes from the tract of land lying between Greece and the Himalayas, vaguely termed the East. The species has not been found undoubtedly wild. All the floras of the south of Europe, of Egypt, and of Western Asia as far as the Caucasus and India, give it as a cultivated species, or growing in fields and cultivated grounds. It has sometimes1617 been indicated in the Crimea, and to the north, and especially to the south of the Caucasus, as nearly wild; but well-informed modern authors do not think so.1618 This quasi-wildness can only point to its origin in Armenia and the neighbouring countries. The cultivation and the names of the species may perhaps throw some light on the question.

The Greeks cultivated this species of pea as early as Homer’s time, under the name of erebinthos,1619 and also of krios,1620 from the resemblance of the pea to the head of a ram. The Latins called it cicer, which is the origin of all the modern names in the south of Europe. The name exists also among the Albanians, descendants of the Pelasgians, under the form kikere.1621 The existence of such widely different names shows that the plant was very early known, and perhaps indigenous, in the south-east of Europe.

The chick-pea has not been found in the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, Savoy, and Italy. In the first-named locality its absence is not singular; the climate is not hot enough. A common name among the peoples of the south of the Caucasus and of the Caspian Sea is, in Georgian, nachuda; in Turkish and Armenian, nachius, nachunt; in Persian, nochot.1622 Philologists can tell if this is a very ancient name, and if it has any connection with the Sanskrit chennuka.

The chick-pea is so frequently cultivated in Egypt from the earliest times of the Christian era,1623 that it is supposed to have been also known to the ancient Egyptians. There is no proof to be found in the drawings or stores of grain in their monuments, but it may be supposed that this pea, like the bean and the lentil, was considered common or unclean. Reynier1624 thought that the ketsech, mentioned by Isaiah in the Old Testament, was perhaps the chick-pea; but this name is generally attributed, though without certainty, to Nigella sativa or Vicia sativa.1625 As the Arabs have a totally different name for the chick-pea, omnos, homos, which recurs in the Kabyl language as hammez,1626 it is not likely that the ketsech of the Jews was the same plant. These details lead me to suspect that the species was unknown to the ancient Egyptians and to the Hebrews. It was perhaps introduced among them from Greece or Italy towards the beginning of our era.

It is of more ancient introduction into India, for there is a Sanskrit name, and several others, analogous or different, in modern Indian languages.1627 Bretschneider does not mention the species in China.

I do not know of any proof of antiquity of culture in Spain, yet the Castilian name garbanzo, used also by the Basques under the form garbantzua, and by the French as garvance, being neither Latin nor Arabic, may date from an epoch anterior to the Roman conquest.

Botanical, historical, and philological data agree in indicating a habitation anterior to cultivation in the countries to the south of the Caucasus and to the north of Persia. The western Aryans (Pelasgians, Hellenes) perhaps introduced the plant into Southern Europe, where, however, there is some probability that it was also indigenous. The western Aryans carried it into India. Its area perhaps extended from Persia to Greece, and the species now exists only in cultivated ground, where we do not know whether it springs from a stock originally wild or from cultivated plants.

Lupin—Lupinus albus, Linnæus.

The ancient Greeks and Romans cultivated this leguminous plant to bury it as a green manure, and also for the sake of the seeds, which are a good fodder for cattle, and which are also used by man. The expressions of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Cato, Varro, Pliny, etc., quoted by modern writers, refer to the culture or to the medical properties of the seeds, and do not show whether the species was the white lupin, L. albus, or the blue-flowered lupin, L. hirsutus, which grows wild in the south of Europe. Fraas says1628 that the latter is grown in the Morea at the present day; but Heldreich says1629 that L. albus grows in Attica. As this is the species which has been long cultivated in Italy, it is probable that it is the lupin of the ancients. It was much grown in the eighteenth century, especially in Italy,1630 and de l’Ecluse settles the question of the species, as he calls it Lupinus sativus albo flore.1631 The antiquity of its cultivation in Spain is shown by the existence of four different common names, according to the province; but the plant is only found cultivated or nearly wild in fields and sandy places.1632 The species is indicated by Bertoloni in Italy, on the hills of Sarzana. Yet Caruel does not believe it to be wild here, any more than in other parts of the peninsula.1633 Gussone1634 is very positive for Sicily – “on barren and sandy hills, and in meadows (in herbidis)” Lastly, Grisebach1635 found it in Turkey in Europe, near Ruskoï, and d’Urville1636 saw it in abundance, in a wood near Constantinople. Castagne confirms this in a manuscript catalogue in my possession. Boissier does not mention any locality in the East; the species does not exist in India, but Russian botanists have found it to the south of the Caucasus, though we do not know with certainty if it was really wild.1637 Other localities will perhaps be found between Sicily, Macedonia, and the Caucasus.