a temple erected on what is said to have been the first tea plantation established in Japan, sacred to the traditions of the Japanese and in honor of the Chinese who first introduced the tea plant into the Island empire. Another more authentic account states that the Tea-seed was brought to Japan from China by the Buddhist priest Mi-yoye, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, and first planted in the southern island of Kiusiu, from whence its cultivation soon spread throughout that country. Some English writers go so far as to claim that Assam, in India, is the original country of tea, from the fact that _a species_ has been discovered there in a wild state as well as in the slopes of the Himalaya mountains. But though found in both a wild and cultivated state in many countries of the East at the present time, all its Western traditions point to China, and to China _only_, as the _original_ country of Tea, and that the plant is native and indigenous to that country is indisputably beyond question. It was not known to the Greeks or Romans in any form; and that it could not have been known in India in very early times is inferred from the fact that no reference to the plant or its product is to be found in the _Sanscrit_. But that the plant and its use, not only as an agreeable and exhilarating beverage, but as an article of traffic worthy of other nations, must have been known to the Chinese as early as the first century of the Christian era, the following extract from an ancient work entitled the “Periplous of the Erythræan Sea,” may serve to prove. The author, usually supposed to be Arryan, after describing “a city called Thinæ,” proceeds to narrate a yearly mercantile journey to the vicinity of “a certain people called Sesatæi, of short stature, broad faces, and flat noses”—evidently natives of China—adds “that the articles they bring for traffic outwardly resemble vine leaves, being wrapped in mats, which they leave behind them on their departure to their own country in the interior. From these mats the Thinæ pick out a haulm, called _petros_, from which they draw the fibre and stalks; spreading out the leaves, they double and make them up into balls, passing the fibre through them, in which form they take the name of _Malabathrum_, and under this name they are brought into India by those who so prepare them.” Under any interpretation this account sounds like a remote, obscure and confused story. Still one of the authors of the able “Historical Account of China,” published in 1836, has ventured to identify this Malabathrum of the Thinæ with the Tea of the Chinese. Vossius Vincent and other authors, while admitting the difficulty of understanding why it should be carried from Arracan to China, and from China back to India, unhesitatingly assert that Malabathrum was nothing more than the Betel-leaf, so widely used in the East at the time as a masticatory. Horace mentions Malabathrum, but only as an ointment. Pliny