BEAN, a well known cultivated plant, vicia faba, of Linnwus, now called faba vulgaris. It belongs to the order legu Ininosx. The flowers, which are fragrant, are papilionaceous, white, with violet colored veins and blotches, looking almost black. The seeds are partly kidney shaped. The native country of faba vulgaris is believed to be the regions near the Caspian Sea, the Levant, and Egypt. Faba vulgaris may be primarily divided into the garden bean and the field bean. Of the former, there are numerous sub-varieties. The earliest is the mazagan„ which is small seeded; while the largest is the windsor. The field bean runs into two leading sub varieties, a larger and a smaller one; the latter is called ticks. The horse bean is the variety equina.
The word is also applied to any leguminous plant resembling a bean, though not of the genuine genus faba. Such, for example, as the Florida bean, which is the seed, not the fruit, of a West Indian plant. These seeds are washed up on the Florida shore, and are sometimes used as food:, and some times they are polished and used as orna ments. The navy bean is the common
white bean, used largely as an article of diet by sailors. The pea bean is a small white bean used commonly as food. The tonquin bean is the fragrant seed of a leguminous tree.
In commerce, the word is applied to the seeds of certain plants belonging to the natural order leguminosx. Tne com mon field bean is the seed of the faba vulgaris, the broad, or windsor bean, being a cultivated variety of the same plant. The French, or haricot bean, is the seed of phaseolus multiflorus, and the scarlet runner (which is closely akin to the former) , is phaseolus vulgaris.
Scarlet runners and French beans are used in the pod, in the green state, and eaten as a vegetable. Bean meal, which is more easily digested than whole beans, contains twice as much nitrogenous matter as wheat flour, and is more nutritious.