Cowpea
Cowpea names 2 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Cowpea William, pronounced cooper (1731-1800)
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
William, pronounced cooper (1731-1800), an English poet. His father was court chaplain. William was trained for the law. He received a government clerkship, and lost his mind while studying to take examinations. He sank into a sort of religious mania from which, however, he emerged to write a number of elevated, graceful poems. He died in utter madness and despair. His more mature poems are : Moral Satires, written in imitation of Pope; The Task, in praise of a quiet, secluded country life, a poem much admired by Burns; a Translation of Homer; The Loss of the Royal George, a warship that went down in the English Channel with terrible loss of life; To Mary, in honor of a lady friend; Alexander Selkirk, opening with the well known lines, I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute; and lastly, John Gilpin's Ride, betraying an unexpected but none the less delightful vein of humor and fun in the poet's makeup. SAYINGS. God made the country, man made the town. Not much the worse for wear. How much a dunce that has been sent to roam, Excels a dunce that has been kept at home. Absence of occupation is not rest, A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd. An idler is a watch that wants both hands, As useless if it goes as if it stands. His wit invites you by his looks to come, But when you knock, it never is at home. Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness. Variety's the very spice of life. She that asks Her dear five hundred friends. Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more. SAID OF COWPER. Cowper was the most popular poet of his generation, and the best of English letter writers.--Southey. Poor charming soul, perishing like a frail flower transplanted from a warm land to the snow: the world's temperature was too rough for it; and the moral law, which should have supported it, tore it with its thorns.--Taine. Cowper's style is natural and firm, though sometimes dull. He helped to rid poetry of its artificiality.--Emery.
Cowpea a summer annual
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a summer annual, in appearance resembling the field bean. The cowpea is a native of India and possibly of China. In the East it has been under cultivation for the last two thousand years. In the cotton belt of the United States , the cowpea takes the place of the red clover of more northern and cooler regions. The leaf of the cowpea is tri-foliate. The flowers vary from purple to white. The pods are from five to ten inches in length and are well filled with kidney-shaped or roundish peas. There are numerous varieties. Several, known as crowders, are so called because the beans are crowded together so closely as to have flattened ends. So far as frost is concerned, the cowpea is very tender. Along the Gulf seed is sown in April. In Delaware it is sown as late as July. Like clover and alfalfa, the roots of the cowpea bear tubercles that store up nitrogen. The raising of a crop of cowpeas fertilizes the soil. The crop is cured like a crop of clover or alfalfa. Stacks of cowpea hay have little power to turn rain. The crop, therefore, requires barns or other protection.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account calls the cowpea "a native of India and possibly of China"; botanists now place its origin in Africa, where wild relatives of Vigna unguiculata grow and where it was domesticated, and where it remains a staple — Nigeria alone grows a large share of the world crop, and West African breeding programmes at Ibadan have produced most modern varieties. The claim that "the roots of the cowpea bear tubercles that store up nitrogen" is right in effect but not in mechanism: the nitrogen is fixed from the air by symbiotic rhizobium bacteria living in those nodules. The role Aiton's describes for the plant in the American cotton belt, standing in "for the red clover of more northern and cooler regions," was largely taken over by the soybean, which became the South's dominant legume within a few decades. In the United States the cowpea now survives mainly as a vegetable — the black-eyed pea and the "crowders" the entry names — rather than as a hay and green-manure crop.
Written for this edition, 2026.