This annual grass, which resembles the millets, is cultivated especially in India and the Malay Archipelago. It is also grown in Egypt[1947] and in Abyssinia;[1948] but the silence of many botanists, who have mentioned the plants of the interior and west of Africa, shows that its cultivation is not widely spread on that continent. In Japan[1949] it sometimes escapes from cultivation. The seeds will ripen in the south of Europe, but the plant is valueless there except as fodder.[1950] No author mentions having found it in a wild state in Asia or in Africa. Roxburgh,[1951] who is attentive to such matters, after speaking of its cultivation, adds, “I never saw it wild.” He distinguishes under the name _Eleusine stricta_ a form even more commonly cultivated in India, which appears to be simply a variety of _E. coracana_, and which also he has not found uncultivated. We shall discover its country by other means. In the first place, the species of the genus _Eleusine_ are more numerous in the south of Asia than in other tropical regions. Besides the cultivated plant, Royle[1952] mentions other species, of which the poorer natives of India gather the seeds in the plains. According to Piddington’s _Index_, there is a Sanskrit name, _rajika_, and several other names in the modern languages of India. That of _coracana_ comes from an old name used in Ceylon, _kourakhan_.[1953] In the Malay Archipelago the names appear less numerous and less original. In Egypt the cultivation of this species is perhaps not very ancient. The monuments of antiquity bear no trace of it. Græco-Roman authors who knew the country did not speak of it, nor later Prosper Alpin, Forskal, and Delile. We must refer to a modern work, that of Schweinfurth and Ascherson, to find mention of the species, and I cannot even discover an Arab name.[1954] Thus botany, history, and philology point to an Indian origin. The flora of British India, in which the Graminæ have not yet appeared, will perhaps tell us the plant has been found wild in recent explorations. A nearly allied species is grown in Abyssinia, _Eleusine Tocussa_, Fresenius,[1955] a plant very little known, which is perhaps a native of Africa. +Rice+—_Oryza sativa_, Linnæus. In the ceremony instituted by the Chinese Emperor Chin-nong, 2800 years B.C., rice plays the principal part. The reigning emperor must himself sow it, whereas the four other species are or may be sown by the princes of his family.[1956] The five species are considered by the Chinese as indigenous, and it must be admitted that this is probably the case with rice, which is in general use, and has been so for a long time; in a country intersected by canals and rivers, and hence peculiarly favourable to aquatic plants. Botanists have not sufficiently studied Chinese plants for us to know whether rice is often found outside cultivated ground; but Loureiro[1957] had seen it in marshes in Cochin-China.