ON THE MIGRATION OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 325 
the Siamese as kao, in the Cambodian as ang-ka, and in the Anam, as 
lua. The many languages of the Malay and Philippine Archipelagoes 
are a signal exception to this diversity, for with them the general name 
is the same throughout, although the languages themselves often differ 
widely in words, in structure, and in sound. That name is padi, varied 
into pari, pali, pasi, and vari, according to national pronunciations, 
and it prevails not only from one extremity to the other of the two great 
archipelagoes, but extends even to the language of remote Madagascar. 
There is but one exception to this uniformity, and it is found in the 
recondite and dead language of Java, called the Slawi, which abounds 
in Sanskrit, and in which the term dana, an obvious corruption of the 
Sanskrit name already given. 
The Persian name for rice is skali, which, as already stated, is that 
for it in the Tamil. This leads to the belief that the grain was most 
probably introduced into Persia from Southern India in the course of 
that maritime trade which is known to have been carried on for ages 
between the ports on the western coast of India, where the Tamil is 
the vernacular tongue, and those on the Persian Gulf. Had this cereal 
reached Persia from Northern India, its name, as in the case of wheat, 
would have been traceable to the Sanskrit, or one of its derivatives. 
The name for rice in Arabie is arus, and this is obviously the source 
of the arros of the Spanish, the rizo of the Italian, the riz of the 
French, and the rice of the English, —the word increasing in corruption 
from Spain to Britain. It points to Spain as the country where the eul- 
ture of this corn was first introduced into Europe by the Arabs. Rice, 
however, was known to the Greeks of the lower empire before the 
Arabian conquest of ‘Spain; but they too must have learnt it from the 
Arabs, for the name they gave it, arwza, seems to be equally of Arabie 
origin as the names which it bears in the modern languages of Europe. 
The Arabic name itself may be supposed an original native word, and 
rice itself the indigenous plant of a country, the greater part of which 
is tropical, and therefore congenial to its growth. The vast import- 
auce attached to rice by those of whom it is the chief bread-corn, and 
perhaps also the tendency of the Oriental languages to run into verbal 
redundance, is strikingly exemplified in the case of this corn. Rice 
sports into far more varieties than any of the corns familiar to Europeans, 
for some varieties grow in the water and some on dry land; some come 
to maturity in three months, while others take some some four and six 
