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416   SINO-IRANICA

SCHLIMMER1 says that Olea europaea is largely cultivated by the inhabitants of Mendjil between Besht and Ghezwin in Persia, and that the olives are excellent; nevertheless the oil extracted is very bad and unfit to eat. The geographical distribution of the tree in Iran has well been traced by F. SPIEGEL.2

The word ts`i-t`un has been perpetuated by the lexicographers of the Emperor Kien-lun (1736-95). It makes its appearance in the Dictionary of Four Languages, in the section "foreign fruit."3 For the Tibetan and Mongol forms, one has chosen the transcriptions siu (transcribing tse ) and citun jimin respectively; while it is surprising to find a Manchu equivalent ulusun, which has been correctly explained by H. C. v. d. Gabelentz and Sakharov. In the Manchu-. Chinese Dictionary Ts`in wen pu hui, published in 1771, we find the

fact be correct, is that a wild olive once occurred in the Pliocene of Italy, which certainly does not exclude the idea and the well-established historical fact that the cultivated olive was introduced into Italy from Greece in historical times. The notice of Pliny (xv, i) weighs considerably more in this case than any alleged palæontological wisdom, and the Pliocene has nothing to do with historical times of human history. The following is truly characteristic of Engler's uncritical standpoint and his inability to think historically: "Since the fruits of the olive-tree are propagated by birds, and in many localities throughout the Mediterranean the conditions for the existence of the tree were prepared, it was quite natural also that the tree settled in the localities suitable for it, before the Oriental civilized nations made one of the most important useful plants of it." If the birds were the sole propagators of the tree, why did they not carry it to India, the Archipelago, and China, where it never occurred? The distribution of the olive shows most clearly that it was brought about by human activity, and that we are confronted with a well-defined geographical zone as the product of human civilization,—Western Asia and the Mediterranean area. There is nothing in Engler like the vision and breadth of thought of a de Candolle, in whose Origin of Cultivated Plants we read (p. 28o), "The question is not clearly stated when we ask if such and such olive-trees of a given locality are really wild. In a woody species which lives so long and shoots again from the same stock when cut off by accident, it is impossible to know the origin of the individuals observed. They may have been sown by man or birds at a very early epoch, for olive-trees of more than a thousand years old are known. The effect of such sowing is a naturalization, which is equivalent to an extension of area. The point in question is, therefore, to discover what was the home of the species in very early prehistoric times, and how this area has grown larger by different modes of transport. It is not by the study of living olive-trees that this can be answered. We must seek in what countries the cultivation began, and how it was propagated. The more ancient it is in any region, the more probable it is that the species has existed wild there from the time of those geological events which took place before the coming of prehistoric man." Here we meet a thinker of critical acumen, possessed of a fine historical spirit, and striving for truth nobly and honestly; and there, a dry pedant, who thinks merely in terms of species and genera, and is unwilling to learn and to understand history.

1 Terminologie, p. 406.

2 Eranische Altertumskunde, Vol. I, pp. 257-258.

3 Appendix, Ch. 3, p. 1o.

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