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 _Iliad_[1591] 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]