It seems probable that the removal of the tropical Indian plant to China, more than a thousand years ago, with its much colder and dryer climate and its poorer soil--for the best soil of China has been set apart for rice and other indespensable foods-- together with continual removal of its leaves, have in time evolved a tea plant so different from its parent stock, that scientists failed for many years to recognize the Indian original. Several times in the early years of this century zealous travellers and residents of India sent to England specimens of the native Indian tea plant for scientific examination. But conservative government officials had already established a botanical or technical standard for the tea plant to which every aspirant for relationship must conform; no one of them seems to have thought of the simple test of the teapot. Finally some rash investigator, not having the fear of scientific anathema before his eyes, crudely cured a few leaves, and actually put them in hot water. Tea merchants immediately recognized the plant and the magic circle of the Circumlocution Office was smashed into bits. Meanwhile, Chinese tea plants and Chinese experts and laborers had been imported into India and tea gardens were well under way before the native tea plant had been recognized. But in the ultra-tropical climate of India, Chinese tea plants languished, and success was finally obtained only by abandoning the stunted Chinese varieties, and getting back nearer to the indigenous Thea Assimica; and by the introduction of modern agricultural methods under British management, and even by the use of machinery for rolling tea and for firing tea by currents of hot air. Indian laborers now supersede the Chinese workmen, who were not found sufficiently pliable in adapting themselves to European ideas. To preserve the historical record of tea so far as possible, we will state that while the indigenous Indian tea plant had been recognized somewhere about the year 1820, the first serious and sustained attempts to grow tea in India were made by Englishmen, about 1834, using Chinese tea plants and Chinese workmen for the purpose. English authorities differ upon the exact dates. The first shipment of English grown tea from India to London was made in 1838; it amounted to but 60 chests, which brought at auction in London $2.25 a pound. The second shipment in 1839 of ninety five chests brought $2.00 a pound. In 1899 the Indian tea crop amounted to about 175,000,000 lbs., and the size of Indian tea gardens varied from 100 acres or less up to 4,000 acres. In 1897 the total acreage of tea plantations in India was stated by Mr. Crole at 509,500 acres, equal to nearly 800 square miles.