“The clove must have come originally from the Moluccas,” as Rumphius asserts,[777] for its cultivation was limited two centuries ago to a few little islands in this archipelago. I cannot, however, find any proof that the true clove tree, with peduncles and aromatic buds, has been found in a wild state. Rumphius[778] considers that a plant of which he gives a description, and a drawing under the name _Caryophyllum sylvestre_, belongs to the same species, and this plant is wild throughout the Moluccas. A native told him that the cultivated clove trees degenerate into this form, and Rumphius himself found a plant of _C. sylvestre_ in a deserted plantation of cultivated cloves. Nevertheless plate 3 differs from plate 1 of the cultivated clove in the shape of the leaves and of the teeth of the calix. I do not speak of plate 2, which appears to be an abnormal form of the cultivated clove. Rumphius says that _C. sylvestre_ has no aromatic properties; now, as a rule, the aromatic properties are more developed in the wild plants of a species than in the cultivated plants. Sonnerat[779] also publishes figures of the true clove and of a spurious clove found in a small island near the country of the Papuans. It is easy to see that his false clove differs completely by its blunt leaves from the true clove, and also from the two species of Rumphius. I cannot make up my mind to class all these different plants, wild and cultivated, together, as all authors have done.[780] It is especially necessary to exclude plate 120 of Sonnerat, which is admitted in the _Botanical Magazine_. An historical account of the cultivation of the clove, and of its introduction into different countries, will be found in the last-named work, in the _Dictionnaire d’Agriculture_, and in the dictionaries of natural history. If it be true, as Roxburgh says,[781] that the Sanskrit language had a name, _luvunga_, for the clove, the trade in this spice must date from a very early epoch, even supposing the name to be more modern than the true Sanskrit. But I doubt its genuine character, for the Romans would have known of a substance so easily transported, and it does not appear that it was introduced into Europe before the discovery of the Moluccas by the Portuguese. +Hop+—_Humulus Lupulus_, Linnæus. The hop is wild in Europe from England and Sweden as far south as the mountains of the Mediterranean basin, and in Asia as far as Damascus, as the south of the Caspian Sea, and of Eastern Siberia,[782] but it is not found in India, the north of China, or the basin of the river Amur.[783]