Vegetable substances used for the food of man / [Edwin Lankester. Revised and partly rewritten].

  • Edwin Lankester
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vegetable substances used for the food of man / [Edwin Lankester. Revised and partly rewritten]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1-28 able places, if they are sown in autumn, and eleared the instant they are ripe, they may be followed by turnips the same year; but if the sowing is delayed till after Christmas, the ground will not be free in time for any crop save winter wheat. A crop of peas is considered to improve the soil, especially for turnijjs. But it is not on the whole very profitable, unless upon very rich loams, in which situation they are oi'ten sown with beans, and the produce used as food for stock. The bean-stalks, from their greater strength, prevent the peas from lodging. The Bean ( Viciafoba) has been cultivated in Britain from very remote anticpiity, having been in all ])robability introduced into this country by the Romans. It is said to have originated in Egypt; perhaps because the Greeks, from whom we have the earliest accounts of it, received it from that country as a cultivated vegetable. Some travellers affirm that the bean is found growing w ild in Persia, near the shores of the Caspian ; but that part of Asia has been subjected to so many fluctuations, to so many alternations of culture and destruction, that it is not easy to decide whether any plants which may be discovered vegetating spontaneously be really indigenous, or only the remains of a foniior cultivation. In maii}^ parts of Britain, wdierc all other memorials of former habitations and culture have been swept away, certain jdants arc I’ound growing which a traveller passing hastily over the country would very naturally describe as indigenous, since of their introduction the jircscnt in- habitants of the vicinity could most ju-obably give him no account, but which from history and the nature of the plants themselves arc known to be c.xotics introduced at a specific time. Beans arc cultivated over many countries, as far to the eastward as China and Japan, and they arc very srcncrally used as an esculent in many j)arts of Africa; from its northern coast some of the more valuable varie- ties were transplanted by the INIoors into S))ain, and by the Portuguese into their own country. This plant is grown abundantly in Barbary, where
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