The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c26.86

v1.c26.86

In the vegetable realm, the Greeks noticed the two annual harvests, the winter and summer one, the sign of an astonishing fertility⁵. They knew that rice and millet were sown in the summer, wheat and barley in the winter⁶, and Aristobulus described the cultivation of rice in enclosed sheets of water⁷. They saw trees, which the generative power of the Indian soil endowed with a strange capacity of self-propagation—the branches curving to the ground to become themselves new trunks, till a single tree became a pillared tent, under whose roof of broad leaves a troop of horsemen could find shade from the noonday heat⁸. Among the plants two especially interested them. One was the sugar-cane, the reeds that make honey without the agency of bees⁹. Megasthenes seems to have attempted a scientific explanation of its sweet juice. It was due to the water which it absorbed from the soil being so warmed by the sun's heat, that the plant was virtually cooked as it grew¹⁰! The other plant was the cotton-plant, yielding vegetable wool. Some of it the Macedonians used uncarded as stuffing for saddles and suchlike¹. Precious spices, of course, also and strange poisons were associated in the Greek mind with India. As to the latter, Aristobulus was told that a law obtaining among the Indians pronounced death upon any man revealing a new poison, unless he at the same time revealed a remedy for it; if he did both, he received a reward from the king².