ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the deal primarily with the plants that came into India from the New World. Also included are a few species which entered the country from elsewhere—the sun-flower, the soyabean, the litchi fruit and the tea plant—but were developed here during the same period. Christopher Columbus of Spain set foot in the New World in 1492. Six years later, Vasco da Gama of Portugal reached India. The Portuguese slave trade lay between Brazil and Africa, and thence led to Goa, with further exchanges between other Portuguese settlements in south-east Asia and China. China is the home of the soyabcan. It probably originated in the eastern half of north China about 1200 ac, probably from Glycine soja,a wild form related to the cultivated Glycine max. A native of south-east Brazil, the cashew tree must have been brought into India at a very early date.
