A History of Agriculture in India v1.c30.3

v1.c30.3

THE Greeks noticed in India two annual harvests—the winter and the summer ones—and the sign of an astonishing soil fertility. They knew that rice and millets were sown in summer, and wheat and barley in winter. Aristobulus described the cultivation of rice in enclosed sheets of water. 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 heat. The reference is obviously to the banyan-tree and its pillar-like aerial roots. Among the plants, two especially interested them. One was sugarcane, ‘the reeds that make honey without the agency of bees’. 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 grew. The other plant was the cotton plant, yielding vegetable wool. Some of it the Macedonians used uncarded as stuffing for saddles and suchlike. Spices were also associated in the Greek mind with India.¹