PLANTS CULTIVATED FOR THEIR SUBTERRANEAN PARTS. 31 



Cheops, according to an inscription upon the monument, 

 linger^ copied from Lepsius' work two drawings from 

 the temple of Karnak, of which the first, at any rate, 

 appears to represent the radish. 



From all this we gather, first, that the species 

 spreads easily from cultivation in the west of Asia and 

 the south of Europe, while it does not appear with cer- 

 tainty in the flora of Eastern Asia ; and secondly, that 

 in the regions south of the Caucasus it is found without 

 any sign of culture, so that we are led to suppose that 

 the plant is wild there. From these two reasons it 

 appears to have come originally from Western Asia 

 between Palestine, Anatolia, and the Caucasus, perhaps 

 also from Greece ; its cultivation spreading east and west 

 from a very early period. 



The common names support these hypotheses. In 

 Europe they offer little interest when they refer to the 

 quality of the root (radis), or to some comparison with 

 the turnip (ravanello in Italian, rabica in Spanish, etc), 

 but the ancient Greeks coined the special name o^aphanos 

 (easily reared). The Italian word rainoraccio is derived 

 from the Greek cuTmoroAAa, which was used for B,. sativus 

 or some allied species, Modem interpreters have erro- 

 neously referred this name to Gochlearia Armoracia or 

 horse-radish, which I shall come to presently. Semitic ^ 

 languages have quite difierent names (fugla in Hebrew, 

 fuil,fidgel, jigl, etc., in Arab.). In India, according to 

 Roxburgh,' the common name of a variety with an 

 enormous root, as large sometimes as a man's leg, is 

 moola or vnoolee, in Sanskrit mooluka. Lastly, for 

 Cochin-China, China, and Japan, authors give various 

 names which differ very much one from the other. From 

 this diversity a cultivation which ranged from Greece to 

 Japan must be very ancient, but nothing can thence be 

 concluded as to its original home as a spontaneous plant. 



A totally different opinion exists on the latter point, 



' Unger, Pflanzen des Alien ^gyptens, p. 51, figs. 24 and 29. 

 ' In my mannsoript dictionary of common names, drawn from the 

 floras of thirty years ago. 



3 Roxburgh, Fl. Ind., iii. p. 126. 



