The Peanut Plant: Its Cultivation And Uses

This little work has been prepared mainly for those who have no practical acquaintance with the cultivation of the Peanut. Its directions, therefore, are intended for the beginner, and are such as will enable any intelligent person who has followed farming, to raise good crops of Peanuts, although he may have never before seen the growing plant.
The writer has confined himself to a recital of the more important details, leaving the minor points to be discovered by the farmer himself. If the reader should think these pages devoid of vivacity, let him remember that we have treated of an every-day subject in an every-day style. The interest in the theme will increase when the beginner has pocketed the returns from his first year's crop. Until then, we leave him to plod his way through the details, trusting that the great Giver of the harvest will bless his labors, and amply reward his toils in this new field.
B. W. J.
Warren Place, Surry County, Va., 1885.


Origin. —The native country of the Peanut ( Arachis hypogæa ) is not definitely ascertained. Like many other extensively cultivated plants, it has not been found in a truly wild state. Some botanists regard the plant as a native of Africa, and brought to the New World soon after its discovery. Sloane, in his history of Jamaica, states that peanuts formed a part of the provisions taken by the slave ships for the support of the negroes on the voyage, and leaves it to be inferred that the plant was introduced in this manner. De Candolle, in Géographie Botanique Raisonnée , and his latter work on L'Origine des Plantes Cultivées , strongly inclines to the American origin of the Peanut. The absence of any mention of the plant by early Egyptian and Arabic writers, and the fact that there is no name for it in Sanscrit and Bengalese, are regarded as telling against its Oriental origin. Moreover, there are six other species of Arachis , natives of Brazil, and Bentham and Hooker, in their Genera Plantarum , ask if the plant so generally grown in warm countries may not be a cultivated form of a Brazilian species.