A species of the tea plant has been found growing in a truly wild state in the mountain ranges of Hindostan, particularly on those bordering on the Chinese province of Yunnan, from which fact it is claimed by some writers as probable that these mountains are the original home of tea. Recent explorations also show that the tea plant is to be found growing wild in the forests of Assam, Sylhet and the Himalaya hills, as well as over the great range of mountains extending thence through China to the Yang-tse river. At an early period the British East India Company, as the principal trade intermediary between China and Europe, became deeply interested in the question of tea cultivation in their eastern possessions, but without much success until in 1840, when the Assam Tea Company was formed, from which year the successful cultivation of tea in India has been carried on, the tea districts of that country including at the present time, in the order of their priority, Assam, Dehradun, Kumaon, Darjeeling, Cachar, Kangra, Hazarila, Chittagong, Burmah, Neilgherry and Travancore. Various efforts were made to introduce tea-culture into Ceylon, under both Dutch and British rule, no permanent success being attained until about 1876, when the disastrous effects of the coffee-leaf disease induced the planters to give more serious attention to tea. Since that period tea cultivation has developed there with marvelous rapidity, having every prospect at the present time of taking first rank among Ceylon productions. Dr. Abel highly recommends the Cape of Good Hope as furnishing a fitting soil and climate for the beneficial production of tea, stating that “there is nothing improbable in a plant that is so widely diffused from north to south being grown there.” Tea of average quality being now shipped from Natal to the London market. Besides Java, India and Ceylon, where tea culture has been introduced and profitably demonstrated, numerous attempts have and are being made to colonize the plant in other countries than these of the East, but beyond the countries above enumerated, the industry has so far never taken root, for while the cultivated varieties of the tea-plant are comparatively hardy, possessing an adaptability to climate excelled alone among plants only by that of wheat, the limits of actual tea cultivation extend from the 39th degree of north latitude in Japan, through the tropics to Java, Ceylon, India and China, and while it will live in the open air in many of the countries into which it has been introduced and withstand some amount of frost when it receives sufficient summer heat to harden its root, but comparatively few of those regions are suited for practical tea-growing.