XCVI.— THE NAVEW. 
Brassica campestris Linne. 
I T may, perhaps, be the case that plants growing by the sea-side, under conditions 
somewhat unfavourable to nutrition, especially on account of the salinity of their 
supply of water, develop special tendencies to arrested growth and the storing of 
nutriment. They may thus cease to complete their life-cycle in a single season ; 
lessen their transpiration by coating their leaves with that covering of wax-particles 
which gives them a glaucous hue ; and store up water, with some sugar and other 
organic reserve material in various parts of their structures which become corre- 
spondingly enlarged. This seems to be the explanation of the comparatively large 
proportion of our cultivated vegetables which are of maritime origin. 
If two nearly related wild forms were both brought under the stimulus of 
cultivation at the same time and place various cross-breeding might occur and result 
in the formation of stable “ races,” or forms true to seed, the “ recessives ” of the 
Mendelian experimentalists. After centuries of the artificial selection of the 
cultivator the parentage of such races may well be difficult to unravel. 
Cultivated plants may always stray beyond the boundaries of garden or field, 
and may, whether by reversion or by starvation, degenerate into forms somewhat 
unlike those known in cultivation. 
This is, perhaps, the history of the genus Brassica. Several of its undoubtedly 
wild forms are natives of the sea-shore and have glaucous foliage. In several of the 
cultivated groups there are annual races and others that are biennial, forming only 
an abbreviated stem and a rosette of radical leaves during their first season, and 
flowering and fruiting at the expense of stored-up nutriment during the second. 
De Candolle is of opinion that the cultivation of the species of Brassica is of 
pre-Aryan Europaean origin, there being no certain evidence of it in ancient Chinese 
or Sanskrit literature ; and he suggests that the wild stock may have belonged to 
north-western Europe. Such names as Brassica and Cabbage may be of great 
antiquity, since although the former is Classical Latin and occurs in Pliny, it looks 
rather like a Celtic loan-word, so that the Celtic bresic may be earlier, and kab or 
kap occur in several Celtic and Slavonic forms. 
Of the two great groups of cultivated varieties, Brassica oleracea Linne, 
almost certainly wild on our southern cliffs, has glaucous glabrous leaves, the upper 
ones dilated at the base, and elongated racemes of large cream-coloured or pale 
yellow flowers. Among its chief modifications under cultivation are the variety 
bullata, the Savoy, with hollow dome-like elevations of the cellular tissue between 
the meshes of the leaf-vein ; var. gemmifera, the Brussels Sprout, with lateral buds 
on the stem ; var. botrytis, the Cauliflower, with much-branched, fleshy, aborted 
inflorescences ; and var. caulorapa, the Kohl-rabi, in which the base of the leaf- 
bearing stem is enlarged into a globular green food-store. 
