PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIE SEEDS. 349 



has only seen it in a cultivated state in the north of 

 India, and Bretschneider ^ thinks it doubtful that it is 

 indigenous in China. Its cultivation is not ancient, for 

 the first Chinese author who mentions it lived in the 

 tenth or eleventh century of the Christian era. 



Buckwheat is cultivated in the Himalayas under the 

 names o//a? or ogla and koutoa? As there is no Sanskiit 

 name for this species nor for the two following. I doubt 

 the antiquity of their cultivation in the mountains of 

 Central Asia. It was certainly unknown to the Greeks 

 and Romans. The name fagopiirum is an invention of 

 modern botanists from the similarity in the shape of the 

 seed to a beech-nut. whence also the German huch- 

 weifzen^ (corrupted in English into buckwheat) and the 

 Italian faggina. 



The names of this plant in Eiu'opean languages of 

 Aryan origin have not a common root. Thus the western 

 Aryans did not know the species any more than the 

 Sanskrit-speaking Orientals, a further sign of the non- 

 existence of the plant in the mountains of Central Asia, 

 Even at the present day it is probably unknown in the 

 north of Persia and in Tiu'key, since tioras do not men- 

 tion it.^ Bosc sta^tes, in the Dictionnaire d^Agritmlfure, 

 that Olivier had seen it wild in Persia, but I do not find 

 this in this naturalist's published account of his travels. 



The species came into Eiu'ope in the Middle Ages, 

 through Tartary and Russia. The first mention of its 

 cultivation in Germany occiu-s in a Mecklenburg register 

 of 1436.^ In the sixteenth centiuy it spread towards the 

 centre of Eiu-ope, and in poor soil, as in Brittany, it be- 

 came important. Reynier, who, as a rule, is very accurate, 

 imagined that the French name sarrasin was Keltic:^ 

 but M. le Gall wrote to me formerly that the Breton 

 names simply mean black wheat or black corn, ed-du 



* Bretschneider, On Study, etc., p. 9. 



- Madden, Trans. Edinburgh Bot. Soc, v. p. 118. 



' The English name buckwheat and the French name of some 

 localities, buscail, come from the German. 



* Boissier, Fl. Orient. : Bohse and Boissier, Pjlanzen Transcaucasien. 



' PritzeL SitzungsberichfXaturfor^ch. freunde zu Berlin, May 15, 1866. 



* Kevnier, Economie des Celtes, p. 4:2b. 



