36 ORIGIX OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



radish. The Welsh name rlaiddygl maurth ^ 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 contrar}^, the word 

 chren is in all the Sclavonic lano-uao-es, 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 cidtivation has propagated 

 and naturalized the plant westward from the east for 

 about a thousand years. 



Turnips — Brassica species et varietates radice in- 

 crassatcc. 



The innumerable varieties and subvarieties of the 

 turnip known as swedes, Kohl-rabi, etc., may be aU attri- 

 buted to one of the four species of Linnaeus — Brassicco 

 na]r)ii8, Br. oleracea, Br. rapa, Br. cartipestris — 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 stem ^ 

 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. 



^ H. Davies, Welsh Botanology, p. 63. 



' In turnips and swedes the swelled part is, as in tbe radish, the 

 lower part of the stem, below the cotyledons, with a more or less per- 

 sistent part of the root. (See Turpin, Ann. Sc. Natur., ser. 1, vol. xxi.> 

 In the Kohl-rabi {Brassica oleracea caulo-rajpa) it is the stem. 



