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. Bosc[1586] 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’s[1587] 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 Cyrenaica, 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 Chang-kien’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.