Origin of Cultivated Plants

In the first rank, for certainty, are placed those languages which possess botanical works. For instance, it is possible to recognize a species by means of a Greek description by Dioscorides or Theophrastus, and by the less complete Latin texts of Cato, Columella, or Pliny. Chinese books also give descriptions. Dr. Bretschneider, of the Russian legation at Pekin, has written some excellent papers upon these books, from which I shall often quote.20

The second degree is that of languages possessing a literature composed only of theological and poetical works, or of chronicles of kings and battles. Such works make mention here and there of plants, with epithets or reflections on their mode of flowering, their ripening, their use, etc., which allow their names to be divined, and to be referred to modern botanical nomenclature. With the added help of a knowledge of the flora of the country, and of the common names in the languages derived from the dead language, it is possible to discover approximately the sense of some words. This is the case with Sanskrit,21 Hebrew,22 and Armenian.23

Lastly, a third category of dead languages offers no certainty, but merely presumptions or hypothetical and rare indications. It comprehends those tongues in which there is no written work, such as Keltic, with its dialects, the ancient Sclavonic, Pelasgic, Iberian, the speech of the primitive Aryans, Turanians, etc. It is possible to guess certain names or their approximate form in these dead languages by two methods, both of which should be employed with caution.

The first and best is to consult the languages derived, or which we believe to be derived, directly from the ancient tongues, as Basque for the Iberian language, Albanian for the Pelasgic, Breton, Erse, and Gaelic for Keltic. The danger lies in the possibility of mistake in the filiation of the languages, and especially in a mistaken belief in the antiquity of a plant-name which may have been introduced by another people. Thus the Basque language contains many words which seem to have been taken from the Latin at the time of the Roman rule. Berber is full of Arab words, and Persian of words of every origin, which probably did not exist in Zend.

The other method consists in reconstructing a dead language which had no literature, by means of those which are derived from it; for instance, the speech of the Western Aryans, by means of the words common to several European languages which have sprung from it. Fick’s dictionary will hardly serve for the words of ancient Aryan languages, for he gives but few plant-names, and his arrangement renders it unintelligible to those who have no knowledge of Sanskrit. Adolphe Pictet’s work24 is far more important to naturalists, and a second edition, augmented and improved, has been published since the author’s death. Plant-names and agricultural terms are explained and discussed in this work, in a manner all the more satisfactory that an accurate knowledge of botany is combined with philology. If the author attributes perhaps too much importance to doubtful etymologies, he makes up for it by other knowledge, and by his excellent method and lucidity.

The plant-names of the Euskarian or Basque language have been considered from the point of view of their probable etymology by the Comte de Charencey, in Les Actes de la Société Philologique (vol. i. No. 1, 1869). I shall have occasion to quote this work, of which the difficulties were great, in the absence of all literature and of all derived languages.

6. The necessity for combining the different methods. The various methods of which I have spoken are of unequal value. It is clear that when we have archæological records about a given species, like those of the Egyptian monuments, or of the Swiss lake-dwellings, these are facts of remarkable accuracy. Then come the data furnished by botany, especially those on the spontaneous existence of a species in a given country. These, if examined with care, may be very important. The assertions contained in the works of historians or even of naturalists respecting an epoch at which science was only beginning, have not the same value. Lastly, the common names are only an accessory means, especially in modern languages, and a means which, as we have seen, is not entirely trustworthy. So much may be said in a general way, but in each particular case one method or the other may be more or less important.

Each can only lead to probabilities, since we are dealing with facts of ancient date which are beyond the reach of direct and actual observation. Fortunately, if the same probability is attained in three or four different ways, we approach very near to certainty. The same rule holds good for researches into the history of plants as for researches into the history of nations. A good author consults historians who have spoken of events, the archives in which unpublished documents are found, the inscriptions on ancient monuments, the newspapers, private letters, finally memoirs and even tradition. He gathers probabilities from every source, and then compares these probabilities, weighs and discusses them before deciding. It is a labour of the mind which requires intelligence and judgment. This labour differs widely from observation employed in natural history, and from pure reason which is proper to the exact sciences. Nevertheless, when, by several methods, we reach the same probability, I repeat that the latter is very nearly a certainty. We may even say that it is as much a certainty as historical science can pretend to attain.

I have the proof of this when I compare my present work with that which I composed by the same methods in 1855. For the species which I then studied, I have now more authorities and better authenticated facts, but my conclusions on the origin of each species have scarcely altered. As they were already based on a combination of methods, probabilities have usually become certainties, and I have not been led to conclusions absolutely contrary to those previously formed.

Archæological, philological, and botanical data become more and more numerous. By their means the history of cultivated plants is perfected, while the assertions of ancient authors lose instead of gaining in importance. From the discoveries of antiquaries and philologists, moderns are better acquainted than the Greeks with Chaldea and ancient Egypt. They can prove mistakes in Herodotus. Botanists on their side correct Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny from their knowledge of the flora of Greece and Italy, while the study of classical authors to which learned men have applied themselves for three centuries has already furnished all that it has to give. I cannot help smiling when, at the present day, savants repeat well-known Greek and Latin phrases, and draw from them what they call conclusions. It is trying to extract juice from a lemon which has already been repeatedly squeezed. We must say it frankly, the works which repeat and commentate on the ancient authors of Greece and Rome without giving the first place to botanical and archæological facts, are no longer on a level with the science of the day. Nevertheless, I could name several German works which have attained to the honour of a third edition. It would have been better to reprint the earlier publications of Fraas and Lenz, of Targioni and Heldreich, which have always given more weight to the modern data of botany, than to the vague descriptions of classic authors; that is to say, to facts than to words and phrases.

PART II.

On the Study of Species, considered as to their Origin, their early Cultivation, and the Principal Facts of their Diffusion.25

CHAPTER I.

PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SUBTERRANEAN PARTS, SUCH AS ROOTS, TUBERCLES, OR BULBS.26

Radish.—Raphanus sativus, Linnæus.

The radish is cultivated for what is called the root, which is, properly speaking, the lower part of the stem with the tap root.27 Every one knows how the size, shape, and colour of those organs which become fleshy vary according to the soil or the variety.

There is no doubt that the species is indigenous in the temperate regions of the old world; but, as it has been cultivated in gardens from the earliest historic times, from China and Japan to Europe, and as it sows itself frequently round cultivated plots, it is difficult to fix upon its starting-point.

Formerly Raphanus sativus was confounded with kindred species of the Mediterranean region, to which certain Greek names were attributed; but Gay, the botanist, who has done a good deal towards eliminating these analogous forms,28 considered R. sativus as a native of the East, perhaps of China. Linnæus also supposed this plant to be of Chinese origin, or at least that variety which is cultivated in China for the sake of extracting oil from the seeds.29 Several floras of the south of Europe mention the species as subspontaneous or escaped from cultivation, never as spontaneous. Ledebour had seen a specimen found near Mount Ararat, had sown the seeds of it and verified the species.30 However, Boissier,31 in 1867, in his Eastern Flora, says that it is only subspontaneous in the cultivated parts of Anatolia, near Mersivan (according to Wied), in Palestine (on his own authority), in Armenia (according to Ledebour), and probably elsewhere, which agrees with the assertions found in European floras.32 Buhse names a locality, the Ssahend mountains, to the south of the Caucasus, which appears to be far enough from cultivation. The recent Flora of British India33 and the earlier Flora of Cochin-China by Loureiro, mention the radish only as a cultivated species. Maximowicz saw it in a garden in the north-east of China.34 Thunberg speaks of it as a plant of general cultivation in Japan, and growing also by the side of the roads,35 but the latter fact is not repeated by modern authors, who are probably better informed.36

Herodotus (Hist., 1. 2, c. 125) speaks of a radish which he calls surmaia, used by the builders of the pyramid of Cheops, according to an inscription upon the monument. Unger37 copied from Lepsius’ work two drawings from the temple of Karnak, of which the first, at any rate, appears to represent the radish.

From all this we gather, first, that the species spreads easily from cultivation in the west of Asia and the south of Europe, while it does not appear with certainty in the flora of Eastern Asia; and secondly, that in the regions south of the Caucasus it is found without any sign of culture, so that we are led to suppose that the plant is wild there. From these two reasons it appears to have come originally from Western Asia between Palestine, Anatolia, and the Caucasus, perhaps also from Greece; its cultivation spreading east and west from a very early period.

The common names support these hypotheses. In Europe they offer little interest when they refer to the quality of the root (radis), or to some comparison with the turnip (ravanello in Italian, rabica in Spanish, etc.), but the ancient Greeks coined the special name raphanos (easily reared). The Italian word ramoraccio is derived from the Greek armoracia, which was used for R. sativus or some allied species. Modern interpreters have erroneously referred this name to Cochlearia Armoracia or horse-radish, which I shall come to presently. Semitic38 languages have quite different names (fugla in Hebrew, fuil, fidgel, figl, etc., in Arab.). In India, according to Roxburgh,39 the common name of a variety with an enormous root, as large sometimes as a man’s leg, is moola or moolee, in Sanskrit mooluka. Lastly, for Cochin-China, China, and Japan, authors give various names which differ very much one from the other. From this diversity a cultivation which ranged from Greece to Japan must be very ancient, but nothing can thence be concluded as to its original home as a spontaneous plant.

A totally different opinion exists on the latter point, which we must also examine. Several botanists40 suspect that Raphanus sativus is simply a particular condition, with enlarged root and non-articulated fruit, of Raphanus raphanistrum, a very common plant in the temperate cultivated districts of Europe and Asia, and which is also found in a wild state in sand and light soil near the sea – for instance, at St. Sebastian, in Dalmatia, and at Trebizond.41 Its usual haunts are in deserted fields; and many common names which signify wild radish, show the affinity of the two plants. I should not insist upon this point if their supposed identity were a mere presumption, but it rests upon experiments and observations which it is important to know.

In R. raphanistrum the siliqua is articulated, that is to say, contracted at intervals, and the seeds placed each in a division. In R. sativus the siliqua is continuous, and forms a single cavity. Some botanists had made this difference the basis of two distinct genera, Raphanistrum and Raphanus. But three accurate observers, Webb, Gay, and Spach, have noticed among plants of Raphanus sativus, raised from the same seed, both unilocular and articulated pods, some of them bilocular, others plurilocular. Webb42 arrived at the same results when he afterwards repeated these experiments, and he observed yet another fact of some importance: the radish which sows itself by chance, and is not cultivated, produced the siliquæ of Raphanistrum.43 Another difference between the two plants is in the root, fleshy in R. sativus, slender in R. raphanistrum; but this changes with cultivation, as appears from the experiments of Carrière, the head gardener of the nurseries of the Natural History Museum in Paris.44 It occurred to him to sow the seeds of the slender-rooted Raphanistrum in both stiff and light soil, and in the fourth generation he obtained fleshy radishes, of varied colour and form like those of our gardens. He even gives the figures, which are really curious and conclusive. The pungent taste of the radish was not wanting. To obtain these changes, Carrière sowed in September, so as to make the plant almost biennial instead of annual. The thickening of the root was the natural result, since many biennial plants have fleshy roots.

The inverse experiment remains to be tried – to sow cultivated radishes in a poor soil. Probably the roots would become poorer and poorer, while the siliquæ would become more and more articulated.

From all the experiments I have mentioned, Raphanus sativus might well be a variety of R. raphanistrum, an unstable variety determined by the existence of several generations in a fertile soil. We cannot suppose that ancient uncivilized peoples made essays like those of Carrière, but they may have noticed plants of Raphanistrum grown in richly manured soil, with more or less fleshy roots; and this soon suggested the idea of cultivating them.

I have, however, one objection to make, founded on geographical botany. Raphanus raphanistrum is a European plant which does not exist in Asia.45 It cannot, therefore, be this species that has furnished the inhabitants of India, China, and Japan with the radishes which they have cultivated for centuries. On the other hand, how could R. raphanistrum, which is supposed to have been modified in Europe, have been transmitted in ancient times across the whole of Asia? The transport of cultivated plants has commonly proceeded from Asia into Europe. Chang-Kien certainly brought vegetables from Bactriana into China in the second century B.C., but the radish is not named among the number.

Horse-radish—Cochlearia Armoracia, Linnæus.

This Crucifer, whose rather hard root has the taste of mustard, was sometimes called in French cran, or cranson de Bretagne. This was an error caused by the old botanical name Armoracia, which was taken for a corruption of Armorica (Brittany). Armoracia occurs in Pliny, and was applied to a crucifer of the Pontine province, which was perhaps Raphanus sativus. After I had formerly46 pointed out this confusion, I expressed myself as follows on the mistaken origin of the species: —Cochlearia Armoracia is not wild in Brittany, a fact now established by the researches of botanists in the west of France. The Abbé Delalande mentions it in his little work, entitled Hœdic et Houat,47 in which he gives so interesting an account of the customs and productions of these two little islands of Brittany. He quotes the opinion of M. le Gall, who, in an unpublished flora of Morbihan, declares the plant foreign to Brittany. This proof, however, is less strong than others, since the south coast of the peninsula of Brittany is not yet sufficiently known to botanists, and the ancient Armorica extended over a portion of Normandy where the wild horse-radish is now found.48 This leads me to speak of the original home of the species. English botanists mention it as wild in Great Britain, but are doubtful about its origin. Watson49 considers it as introduced by cultivation. The difficulty of extirpating it, he says, from places where it is cultivated, is well known to gardeners. It is therefore not surprising that this plant should take possession of waste ground, and persist there so as to appear indigenous. Babington50 mentions only one spot where the species appears to be really wild, namely, Swansea. We will try to solve the problem by further arguments.

Cochlearia Armoracia is a plant belonging to the temperate, and especially to the eastern regions of Europe. It is diffused from Finland to Astrakhan, and to the desert of Cuman.51 Grisebach mentions also several localities in Turkey in Europe, near Enos, for instance, where it abounds on the sea-shore.52

The further we advance towards the west of Europe, the less the authors of floras appear sure that the plant is indigenous, and the localities assigned to it are more scattered and doubtful. The species is rarer in Norway than in Sweden,53 in the British Isles than in Holland, where a foreign origin is not attributed to it.54

The specific names confirm the impression of its origin in the east rather than in the west of Europe; thus the name chren55 in Russia recurs in all the Sclavonic languages, krenai in Lithuanian, chren in Illyrian,56 etc. It has introduced itself into a few German dialects, round Vienna,57 for instance, where it persists, in spite of the spread of the German tongue. We owe to it also the French names cran or cranson. The word used in Germany, Meerretig, and in Holland, meer-radys, whence the Italian Swiss dialect has taken the name méridi, or mérédi, means sea-radish, and is not primitive like the word chren. It comes probably from the fact that the plant grows well near the sea, a circumstance common to many of the Cruciferæ, and which should be the case with this species, for it is wild in the east of Russia where there is a good deal of salt soil. The Swedish name peppar-rot58 suggests the idea that the species came into Sweden later than the introduction of pepper by commerce into the north of Europe. However, the name may have taken the place of an older one, which has remained unknown to us. The English name of horse-radish is not of such an original nature as to lead to a belief in the existence of the species in the country before the Saxon conquest. It means a very strong radish. The Welsh name rhuddygl maurth59 is only the translation of the English word, whence we may infer that the Kelts of Great Britain had no special name, and were not acquainted with the species. In the west of France, the name raifort, which is the commonest, merely means strong root. Formerly it bore in France the names of German, or Capuchin mustard, which shows a foreign and recent origin. On the contrary, the word chren is in all the Sclavonic languages, a word which has penetrated into some German and French dialects under the forms of kreen, cran, and cranson, and which is certainly of a primitive nature, and shows the antiquity of the species in temperate Eastern Europe. It is therefore most probable that cultivation has propagated and naturalized the plant westward from the east for about a thousand years.

Turnips—Brassica species et varietates radice in crassata.

The innumerable varieties and subvarieties of the turnip known as swedes, Kohl-rabi, etc., may be all attributed to one of the four species of Linnæus —Brassica napus, Br. oleracea, Br. rapa, Br. campestris– of which the two last should, according to modern authors, be fused into one. Other varieties of the species are cultivated for the leaves (cabbages), for the inflorescence (cauliflowers), or for the oil which is extracted from the seed (colza, rape, etc.). When the root or the lower part of the stem60 is fleshy, the seed is not abundant, nor worth the trouble of extracting the oil; when those organs are slender, the production of the seed, on the contrary, becomes more important, and decides the economic use of the plant. In other words, the store of nutritious matter is placed sometimes in the lower, sometimes in the upper part of the plant, although the organization of the flower and fruit is similar, or nearly so.

Touching the question of origin, we need not occupy ourselves with the botanical limits of the species, and with the classification of the races, varieties, and sub-varieties,61 since all the Brassicæ are of European and Siberian origin, and are still to be seen in these regions wild, or half wild, in some form or other.

Plants so commonly cultivated and whose germination is so easy often spread round cultivated places; hence some uncertainty regarding the really wild nature of the plants found in the open country. Nevertheless, Linnæus mentions that Brassica napus grows in the sand on the sea-coast in Sweden (Gothland), Holland, and England, which is confirmed, as far as Sweden is concerned, by Fries,62 who, with his usual attention to questions of this nature, mentions Br. Campestris, L. (type of the Rapa with slender roots), as really wild in the whole Scandinavian peninsula, in Finland and Denmark. Ledebour63 indicates it in the whole of Russia, Siberia, and the Caspian Sea.

The floras of temperate and southern Asia mention rapes and turnips as cultivated plants, never as escaped from cultivation.64 This is already an indication of foreign origin. The evidence of philology is no less significant.

There is no Sanskrit name for these plants, but only modern Hindu and Bengalee names, and those only for Brassica rapa and B. oleracea.65 Kæmpfer66 gives Japanese names for the turnip —busei, or more commonly aona– but there is nothing to show that these names are ancient. Bretschneider, who has made a careful study of Chinese authors, mentions no Brassica. Apparently they do not occur in any of the ancient works on botany and agriculture, although several varieties are now cultivated in China.

It is just the reverse in Europe. The old languages have a number of names which seem to be original. Brassica rapa is called meipen or erfinen67 in Wales; repa and rippa in several Slav tongues,68 which answers to the Latin rapa, and is allied to the neipa of the Anglo-Saxons. The Brassica napus is in Welsh bresych yr yd; in Erse braisscagh buigh, according to Threlkeld,69 who sees in braisscagh the root of the Latin Brassica. A Polish name, karpiele, a Lithuanian, jellazoji,70 are also given, without speaking of a host of other names, transferred sometimes in popular speech from one species to another. I shall speak of the names of Brassica oleracea when I come to vegetables.

The Hebrews had no names for cabbages, rapes, and turnips,71 but there are Arab names: selgam for the Br. napus, and subjum or subjumi for Br. rapa; words which recur in Persian and even in Bengali, transferred perhaps from one species to another. The cultivation of these plants has therefore been diffused in the south-west of Asia since Hebrew antiquity.