The Gardeners' Chronicle says : " Of the actual commencement of cultivation on a large scale little or nothing is known. A Fig is represented in the pyramids of Ghizeh, which have an antiquity estimated by various writers at a period varying from 1,500 to 4,200 years before the Christian era. In China, 2,700 years before Christ, religious ceremonies were instituted in connection with agricultural pursuits. But these dates, even if trustworthy, evidently do not go back far enough. China, south-west Asia (with Egypt), and tropical America, are the three principal regions in which the cultivation of leading agricultural plants originated, and from which it spread."