Bean, broad bean. Boerhaave identifies six species of this plant and Tournefort eight, but here it will suffice to describe the principal species, which botanists call faba major and the French ‘fève de jardin’ or ‘des marais’. [1]

Dodoens names the seed of this plant ‘boona’. [2] The Germans say ‘boon’, the English ‘bean’, and the inhabitants of Lombardy ‘bajana’.

This leguminous fruit best illustrates the nature and structure of seeds in general. Apart from its two integuments, it is composed of three parts of which the main part is separated into two lobes known as the radicle and plumule. The radicle becomes the root of the plant while the plumule forms the stem, bearing leaves and flowers: it is in the plumule that the leaves of the broad bean exist, daintily rolled and already in the shape in which they will unfurl when they are above ground.

The organic and similar parts of the broad bean are.

1. The cuticle which nourishes itself, grows with the broad bean, and stretches over its whole surface.

2. The parenchyma which is identical in the lobes, radicle, plumule, and main body of the broad bean.

3. The inner body disseminated throughout the parenchyma, which Grew calls the seminal root and distinguishes from the radicle. [3] In the root, which is composed of a pellicle, a cortical part, and a ligneous part, there is often a type of sweet, pulpy pith. See the famous English author’s The Anatomy of Plants, for since it is impossible for us to enter into detail we will merely add that Boyle has observed that the expansion of the sap during the growth of the broad bean is so considerable that it can raise a body loaded with a hundredweight. [4]

Notes

1. That is, ‘garden’ or ‘marsh’ bean, which is similar to our ‘field’ bean. The broad bean is now Vicia faba. The Dutch doctor and chemist Hermann Boerhaave (1668- 1738) taught at Leiden, where he drew students from all over Europe; Encyclopedia Britannica, 1995, ii.320).

2. The Dutch physician and herbalist Rembert Dodoens (1516-85) composed a herbal which was translated into French as Histoire des plantes by the Flemish botanist Charles de L’Ecluse in 1557. On L’Ecluse, see article ‘Tulipe’, n. 23.

3. ‘If you take the lobe of a bean, and lengthwise pare off its parenchyma by degrees, and in extreme thin slices, many branches of the seminal root will appear’ (Grew, 1682, book I, ch.l: ‘Of the seed in its state of vegetation’, p. 5). From the beginning of the eighteenth century, ‘seminal root’ and ‘radicle’ were synonymous.

4. The celebrated English philosopher Robert Boyle (1627-91) conducted experiments with Grew.