Origin of Cultivated Plants. Alphonse de Candolle

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ