+Sugar-Cane+—_Saccharum officinarum_, Linnæus.
The origin of the sugar-cane, of its cultivation, and of the manufacture of sugar, are the subject of a very remarkable work by the geographer, Karl Ritter.[752] I need not follow his purely agricultural and economical details; but for that which interests us particularly, the primitive habitat of the species, he is the best guide, and the facts observed during the last forty years for the most part support or confirm his opinions.
The sugar-cane is cultivated at the present day in all the warm regions of the globe, but a number of historical facts testify that it was first grown in Southern Asia, whence it spread into Africa, and later into America. The question is, therefore, to discover in what districts of the continent, or in which of the southern islands of Asia, the plant exists, or existed at the time it was first employed.
Ritter has followed the best methods of arriving at a solution. He notes first that all the species known in a wild state, and undoubtedly belonging to the genus _Saccharum_, grow in India, except one in Egypt.[753] Five species have since been described, growing in Java, New Guinea, Timor, and the Philippine Isles.[754] The probabilities are all in favour of an Asiatic origin, to judge from the data furnished by geographical botany.
Unfortunately no botanist had discovered at the time when Ritter wrote, or has since discovered, _Saccharum officinarum_ wild in India, in the adjacent countries or in the archipelago to the south of Asia. All Anglo-Indian authors, Roxburgh, Wallich, Royle, etc., and more recently Aitchison,[755] only mention the plant as a cultivated one. Roxburgh, who was so long a collector in India, says expressly, “where wild I do not know.” The family of the _Gramineæ_ has not yet appeared in Sir Joseph Hooker’s flora. For the island of Ceylon, Thwaites does not even mention the cultivated plant.[756] Rumphius, who has carefully described its cultivation in the Dutch colonies, says nothing about the home of the species. Miquel, Hasskarl, and Blanco mention no wild specimen in Sumatra, Java, or the Philippine Isles. Crawfurd tried to discover it, but failed to do so.[757] At the time of Cook’s voyage Forster found the sugar-cane only as a cultivated plant in the small islands of the Pacific.[758] The natives of New Caledonia cultivate a number of varieties of the sugar-cane, and use it constantly, sucking the syrup from the cane; but Vieillard[759] takes care to say, “From the fact that isolated plants of _Saccharum officinarum_ are often found in the middle of the bush and even on the mountains, it would be wrong to conclude that the plant is indigenous; for these specimens, poor and weak, only mark the site of old plantations, or are sprung from fragments of cane left by the natives, who seldom travel without a piece of cane in the hand.” In 1861, Bentham, who had access to the rich herbarium of Kew, says, in his _Flora of Hongkong_, “We have no authentic and certain proof of a locality where the common sugar-cane is wild.”