Buckwheat is cultivated in the Himalayas under the names _ogal_ or _ogla_ and _kouton_.[1748] As there is no Sanskrit name for this species nor for the two following, I doubt the antiquity of their cultivation in the mountains of Central Asia. It was certainly unknown to the Greeks and Romans. The name _fagopyrum_ is an invention of modern botanists from the similarity in the shape of the seed to a beech-nut, whence also the German _buchweitzen_[1749] (corrupted in English into buckwheat) and the Italian _faggina_. The names of this plant in European languages of Aryan origin have not a common root. Thus the western Aryans did not know the species any more than the Sanskrit-speaking Orientals, a further sign of the nonexistence of the plant in the mountains of Central Asia. Even at the present day it is probably unknown in the north of Persia and in Turkey, since floras do not mention it.[1750] Bosc states, in the _Dictionnaire d’Agriculture_, that Olivier had seen it wild in Persia, but I do not find this in this naturalist’s published account of his travels. The species came into Europe in the Middle Ages, through Tartary and Russia. The first mention of its cultivation in Germany occurs in a Mecklenburg register of 1436.[1751] In the sixteenth century it spread towards the centre of Europe, and in poor soil, as in Brittany, it became important. Reynier, who, as a rule, is very accurate, imagined that the French name _sarrasin_ was Keltic;[1752] but M. le Gall wrote to me formerly that the Breton names simply mean black wheat or black corn, _ed-du_ and _gwinis-du_. There is no original name in Keltic languages, which seems natural now that we know the origin of the species.[1753] When the plant was introduced into Belgium and into France, and even when it became known in Italy, that is to say in the sixteenth century, the name _blé sarrasin_ (Saracen wheat) or _sarrasin_ was commonly adopted. Common names are often so absurd, and so unthinkingly bestowed, that we cannot tell in this particular case whether the name refers to the colour of the grain which was that attributed to the Saracens, or to the supposed introduction from the country of the Arabs or Moors. It was not then known that the species did not exist in the countries south of the Mediterranean, nor even in Syria and Persia. It is also possible that the idea of a southern origin was taken from the name _sarrasin_, which was given from the colour. This origin was admitted until the end of the last and even in the present century.[1754] Reynier was, fifty years ago, the first to oppose it. Buckwheat sometimes escapes from cultivation and becomes quasi-wild. The nearer we approach its original country the more often this occurs, whence it results that it is hard to define the limit of the wild plant on the confines of Europe and Asia, in the Himalayas, and in China. In Japan these semi-naturalizations are not rare.[1755]