PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR STEMS OR LEAVES. 99 



liame is ispany, or ispanaj^ and the Hindu isfany, or 

 palak, according to Piddington, and also piivnis, accord- 

 ing to the same and to Eoxburgh. The absence of any 

 Sanskrit name shows a cultivation of no great antiquity 

 in these regions. Loureiro saw the spinach cultivated 

 at Canton, and Maximowicz in Mantschuria ; ^ but 

 Bretschneider tells us that the Chinese name signifies 

 herb of Persia, and that Western vegetables were com- 

 monly introduced into China a century before the Chris- 

 tian era.^ It is therefore probable that the cultivation 

 of this plant began in Persia from the time of the Graeco- 

 Eoman civilization, or that it did not quickly spread 

 either to the east or to the west of its Persian origin. 

 No Hebrew name is known, so that the Arabs must have 

 received both plant and name from the Persians. No- 

 thing leads us to suppose that they carried this vegetable 

 into Spain. Ebn Baithar, who was living in 1235, was of 

 Malaga ; but the Arabic works he quotes do not say where 

 the plant was cultivated, except one of them, which says 

 that its cultivation was common at Nineveh and Babylon. 

 Herrera's work on Spanish agriculture does not mention 

 the species, although it is inserted in a supplement of 

 recent date, whence it is probable that the edition of 

 1513 did not speak of it ; so that the European cultiva- 

 tion must have come from the East about the fifteenth 

 century. 



Some popular works repeat that spinach is a native 

 of Northern Asia, but there is nothing to confirm this 

 supposition. It evidently comes from the empire of the 

 ancient Medes and Persians. According to Bosc,^ the 

 traveller, Olivier brought back some seeds of it, found in 

 the East in the open country. This would be a positive 

 proof, if the produce of these seeds had been examined 

 by a botanist in order to ascertain the species and the 

 variety. In the present state of our knowledge it must 



^ Roxburgh, FI. Ind., ed. 1832, v. iii. p. 771, applied to Spinaci'a 

 tetandra, whicli seems to be the same species. 

 - Maximowicz, Primitice Fl. Amur,, p. 222. 



^ Bretschneider, Study and Value of Chin. Bof. WorliS, pp. 17, 15. 

 * Diet. d'Agric, v. p. 906. 



