The Spinach 395 



sian vegetable.' ' n There is, however, another side to the case. In all 

 probability, as shown by A. de Candolle, 2 it was Persia where the 

 spinach was first raised as a vegetable; but the date given by him, 

 "from the time of the Graeco-Roman civilization," is far too early.' 

 A. deCandolle's statement that the Arabs did not carry the plant to Spain 

 has already been rectified by L. Leclerc; 4 as his work is usually not in 

 the hands of botanists or other students using de Candolle, this may 

 aptly be pointed out here. 



According to a treatise on agriculture {Kitab el-jalaha) written by 

 Ibn al-Awwam of Spain toward the end of the eleventh century, spinach 

 was cultivated in Spain at that time. 6 Ibn Haddjaj had then even 

 written a special treatise on the cultivation of the vegetable, saying that 

 it was sown at Sevilla in January. From Spain it spread to the rest of 

 Europe. Additional evidence is afforded by the very name of the 

 plant, which is of Persian origin, and was carried by the Arabs to Europe. 

 The Persian designation is aspanah, aspandj or asfindj; Arabic isfenah 

 or isbenah. Hence Mediaeval Latin spinachium or spinarium, 6 Spanish 



1 The outcry of Waiters (Essays on the Chinese Language, p. 347) against the 

 looseness of the term Po-se, and his denunciation of the "Persian vegetable" as "an 

 example of the loose way in which the word is used," are entirely out of place. It 

 is utterly incorrect to say that "they have made it include, beside Persia itself, Syria, 

 Turkey, and the Roman Empire, and sometimes they seem to use it as a sort of 

 general designation for the abode of any barbarian people to the south-west of 

 the Middle Kingdom." Po-se is a good transcription of Parsa, the native designa- 

 tion of Persia, and strictly refers to Persia and to nought else. When P. P. Smith applied 

 the name po-ts'ai to Convolvulus reptans, this was one of the numerous confusions 

 and errors to which he fell victim. Likewise is it untrue, as asserted by Watters, 

 that the term has been applied even to beet and carrot and other vegetables not 

 indigenous in Persia. As on so many other points, Watters was badly informed on 

 this subject also. 



3 Origin of Cultivated Plants, pp. 98-100. 



* This conclusion, again, is the immediate outcome of Bretschneider's Chang- 

 kienomania: for A. de Candolle says, " Bretschneider tells us that the Chinese 

 name signifies 'herb of Persia,' and that Western vegetables were commonly intro- 

 duced into China a century before the Christian era." 



♦Traite" des simples, Vol. I, p. 61. 



6 L. Leclerc, Histoire de la mddecine arabe, Vol. II, p. 112. The Arabic work 

 has been translated into French by Clement-Mullet under the title Ibn al Awwam, 

 le livre de l'agriculture (2 vols., Paris, 1864-67). De Candolle's erroneous theory 

 that "the European cultivation must have come from the East about the fifteenth 

 century," unfortunately still holds sway, and is perpetuated, for instance, in the 

 last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 



* The earliest occurrence of this term quoted by Du Cange refers to the year 

 135 1, and is contained in the Transactio inter Abbatem et Monachos Crassenses. 

 Spinach served the Christian monks of Europe as well as the Buddhists of China. 

 O. Schrader (Reallexikon, p. 788) asserts that the vegetable is first mentioned by 

 Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) under the name spinachium, but he fails to give a 



