272 SING-IRANICA
specific case apt to teach just the opposite : a wild walnut (probably in several species) is indigenous to China, nevertheless the species cultivated in this area did not spring from domestic material, but from seeds imported from Iranian and Tibetan regions of Central Asia. The botanical dogma has been hurled against many deductions of Hehn : botanists proclaimed that vine, fig, laurel, and myrtle have been indigenous to Greece and Italy in a wild state since time immemorial; likewise pomegranate, cypress, and plantain on the Aegean Islands and in Greece; hence it was inferred that also the cultivations of these plants must have been indigenous, and could not have been introduced from the Orient, as insisted on by Hehn. This is nothing but a sophism: the botanists still owe us the proof that the cultivated species were really derived from indigenous stock. A species may indeed be indigenous to a certain locality; and yet, as brought about by historical inter-relations of the peoples, the same or a similar species in the cultivated state may have been introduced from an outside quarter. It is only by painstaking historical research that the history of cultivated plants can be exactly determined. ENGLER (above, p. 258) doubts the occurrence of the wild walnut in China, because a cultivated species was introduced there from Tibet! It is plain now where such logic will lead us. Wilson deserves a place of honor among botanists, for, after close study of the subject in China, he recognized that "it is highly improbable that Juglans regia is indigenous to China."
With reference to the walnut, conditions are the same in China as in the Mediterranean region: there also Juglans regia grows spontaneously; still better, cultivated varieties reached the Greeks from Persia; the Greeks handed these on to the Romans; the Romans transplanted them to Gallia and Germania. Juglans regia occupies an extensive natural area throughout the temperate zone, stretching from the Mediterranean through Iran and the Himalaya as far as southern China and the Chinese maritime provinces. Despite this natural distribution, the fact remains that Iran has been the home and the centre of the best-cultivated varieties, and has transmitted these to Greece, to India, to Central Asia, and to China.
Dr. T. TANAKA has been good enough to furnish the following information, extracted from Japanese literature, in regard to the walnut. "Translation of the notice on ko-t5 (kurumi), `walnut,' from a
Japanese herbal Yamato honzô kC 4A 4 -, by Kaibara Ekken 1~
(Ch. 1o, p. 23), published in 1709.
"Kurumi (kotô) . There are three sorts of walnut. The first
is called oni-gurumi S (`devil walnut'). It is round in shape,
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