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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

250   SING-IRANICA

gwan, gwana, for Pistacia mutica (or P. terebinthus, var. mutica); this form comes nearest to the Chinese transcription.

While a compound *agoz-van(vun), that is, "nut of pistachio," as far as I know, has not yet been traced in Iranian directly, its existence follows from the Chinese record of the term. An analogy to this compound is presented by Kurd kizvan, kezvdn, kazu-van, kasu-van (" pistachio" or "terebinthus-tree").'

The Honzô keimoku keimô (Ch. 25, fol. 24), written by Ono Ranzan

ih ¶    III, first published in 1804, revised in 1847 by Igu6i Bösi

U   his grandson, mentions the same plant Mt   ill-7-, which
reads in Japanese agetsu-kon.i. He gives also in Kana the names fusudasiu or fusudasu.2 He states, "The plant is not known in Japan to grow wild. It used to come from foreign countries, but not so at

present. A book called Zôkyôhi furoku * kk J I t   mentions this
plant, stating that agetsu-kon.i is the fruit of the tree Oa mu AM (in Japanese sakuboku) . i a

1 A. JABA, Dictionnaire kurde-français, p. 333. Cf. above the kasu-dân of Kaempfer.

2 These terms are also given by the eminent Japanese botanist MATSUMURA in his Shokubutsu mei-i (No. 2386), accompanied by the identification Pistacia vexa.

a This tradition is indeed traceable to an ancient Chinese record, which will be found in the een lei pen ts'ao of 1108 (Ch. 12, p. 55, ed. of 1583). Here the question is of the bark of the san or c'a tree '"i * ft, mentioned as early as the sixth century

in the Kwan ci   ,4 of Kwo Yi-kun as growing in wild country of Kwan-nan

(*j (the present province of Kwan-tun and part of Kwan-si), and described fn a commentary of the Er ya as resembling the mulberry-tree. This, of course, is a wild tree indigenous to a certain region of southern China, but, as far as I know, not yet identified, presumably as the ancient name is now obsolete. The Nan cou ki by Sü Piao (see above) says that the fruits of this tree are styled wu min tse

L" nameless fruits ") ; hence the conclusion is offered by T'ain Sen-wei, author of the ein lei pen ts'ao, that this is the tree termed a-yüe-hun by the Persians (that is, a cultivated Pistacia). This inference is obviously erroneous, as the latter was introduced from Persia into China either under the Tang or a few centuries earlier, while the san or c'a tree pre-existed spontaneously in the Chinese flora. The only basis for this hazardous identification is given by the attribute "nameless." A solution of this problem is possible if we remember the fact that there is a wild Pistacia, Pistacia chinensis, indigenous to China, and if we identify with it the tree san or c'a; then it is conceivable that the wild and the imported, cultivated species were correlated and combined under the same popular term wu min. MATSUMURA (op. cit., No. 2382) calls P. chinensis in Japanese ôrenju, adding the characters Ji .. The word lien refers in China to Melia azedarach. The modern Chinese equivalent for P. chinensis is not known to me. The peculiar beauty of this tree, and the great age to which it lives, have attracted the attention of the indefatigable workers of our Department of Agriculture, who have already distributed thousands of young trees to parks throughout the country (see Yearbook of the U. S. Department of Agriculture 1916, p. 140, Washington, 1917). In the English and Chinese Standard Dictionary, the word "pistachio" is rendered by fei tft, which, however, denotes a quite dif-