At the present day the plant is cultivated in Europe, in the north of Africa, in Eastern Asia, India, and elsewhere, but its origin is somewhat obscure. I possess several specimens gathered in India, where Sir Joseph Hooker[342] does not consider the species indigenous. Kotschy brought it back from Karrak, or Karek Island, in the Persian Gulf. The label does not say that it was a cultivated plant. Boissier[343] mentions it without comment, and he afterwards speaks of specimens from Ispahan and Egypt gathered in cultivated ground. Olivier is quoted as having found the cress in Persia, but it is not said whether it was growing wild.[344] It has been asserted that Sibthorp found it in Cyprus, but reference to his work shows it was in the fields.[345] Poech does not mention it in Cyprus.[346] Unger and Kotschy[347] do not consider it to be wild in that island. According to Ledebour,[348] Koch found it round the convent on Mount Ararat; Pallas near Sarepta; Falk on the banks of the Oka, a tributary of the Volga; lastly, H. Martius mentions it in his flora of Moscow; but there is no proof that it was wild in these various localities. Lindemann,[349] in 1860, did not reckon the species among those of Russia, and he only indicates it as cultivated in the Crimea.[350] According to Nyman,[351] the botanist Schur found it wild in Transylvania, while the Austro-Hungarian floras either do not mention the species, or give it as cultivated, or growing in cultivated ground. I am led to believe, by this assemblage of more or less doubtful facts, that the plant is of Persian origin, whence it may have spread, after the Sanskrit epoch, into the gardens of India, Syria, Greece, and Egypt, and even as far as Abyssinia.[352] +Purslane+—_Portulaca oleracea_, Linnæus. Purslane is one of the kitchen garden plants most widely diffused throughout the old world from the earliest times. It has been transported into America,[353] where it spreads itself, as in Europe, in gardens, among rubbish, by the wayside, etc. It is more or less used as a vegetable, a medicinal plant, and is excellent food for pigs.