36 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



radish. The Welsh name rhuddygl mawrth ^ 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 

 Fi-ance, the name roAfort, 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 contrary, the word 

 chren is in all the Sclavonic languages, 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 cultivation has propagated 

 and naturalized the plant westward from the east for 

 about a thousand years. 



Turnips — Brassica species et varietates radice m- 

 crassata. 



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 Linnasus — Brassica 

 napus, Br. oleracea, Br. rapa, Br. campestris — 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 (cokaj 

 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 tho radish, the 

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

 sijtent part of the root. (See Tnrpin, Ann. Sc. Nafur., ser. 1, vol. xxi.) 

 In the Kohl-rabi (Brassica cleracea caulo-rapa) t is the stem. 



