Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass.
- Victor Hehn
- Date:
- 1891
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Cultivated plants and domestic animals in their migration from Asia to Europe / by Victor Hehn ; edited by James Steven Stallybrass. Source: Wellcome Collection.
470/530 page 470
![When flax reached the European nations, it was natural that the existing names for bast and nettle and their products should be ap- plied to the new plant. Thus the Latin linteum acquired the meaning of linen, while in German li?id retained the meaning of bast, and linde that of the tree that supplied it. A Celtic name for nettle is the Cym- ric dynat, danad, in Old Cornish linhaden, Armoric linad, lenad, lin- aden (Zeuss, ed. 2, 1076). The primitive form seems to be the Dacian “8vv=Kvidi]” nettle, preserved in Dioscorides (Diefenbach, O. E. S. 329), and the Greek \Lvov with the same change of d into l as in dynad and linad. If this conjecture be well founded, then the Greeks, when they received flax and linen from Asia in the pre-Homeric time, must have applied their names for the nettle and nettle-fabrics to the similar though far superior texture made of flax. The originally short vowel became in time, and in some districts, long : Xlvov (the contrary process is less probable according to the laws of the development of speech) and that is how the word sounds in Aristophanes (Pac. 1178), and the Comic poet Antiphanes (Atken. 10, p. 455)—the last passage has been wrongly changed by Meineke. In this latter form we find the word in Italy, linumj thence it passed to the transalpine nations, Gothic lein, etc.—The German language has still two names for the plant itself, both evidently derived from plaiting and weaving, and touching on words with the meaning of hair : O. H. Germ, flahs and haru, genitive harawes. The first has in the Lith. ftlaukas and Slav, vlasii the meaning of “ hair ; ” in the Lith. ftlauszas that of “ fine bastfahs, hair, a by-form of flaks, is identical with the Greek ttskoq, TTtaicog (which last is explained by the Scholiast to Nic. Ther., 549: 7te(tkoq 8e tov (p\oiov rrjg fioTaiaig, i.e., bast), 7r£/cw, I comb, Latin pecto. Haru, haraw, Old Norse hor, flax, we hold to be identical with the Slavic kropiva, krapiva, nettle, and Albanian kerp, hemp. Among the things fished up from the Swiss lakes were found bundles of flax, pieces of linen stuff, mats plaited of flax, etc. As eminent naturalists have recognised the real fibres of flax in the above-named remains we cannot doubt the fact, although Garrigou and Filhol (Age de la Pierre Polie, p. 51, Paris et Toulouse, s.a., 4to) cautiously say : “ Le lin leur etait probablement connu, a moins qil une autre plante a ecorce filamenteuse (the great nettle ?) ait pu leur fournir de quoi faire des vetemenisT At any rate, the flax was not that we now use, but a particular variety. O. Heer says (Mittheilungen der Antiquari- sche?i Gesellschaft in Ziirich, 15, 312) : “The lake-dwellings linen is not the common flax. The small-leaved flax, linum angustifolium Huds., which is native to the Mediterranean countries from Greece and Dalmatia to the Pyrenees, may be called the mother-plant of the cultivated lake-dwellings linen. The Cretan catch-fly proves that the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24874309_0470.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
