BOTANICAL STUDY AND HISTORY.
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Woad with the remark that "so long as history endures, its
"services will be held in grateful and everlasting remembrance."
Though the main purpose of the author was to teach economic
students the lessons to be learned from the mediaeval and modern
history of Woad, he did not regard its earlier history as negligible.
This is dealt with in chapters devoted to the place of the plant
in the vegetable kingdom; to the role of Woad in therapeutics ;
to the philology of the name. We are the more grateful to Dr.
Hurry for this service, because the history of Woad is not dis-
cussed, either by M. De Candolle in "the Origin of Cultivated
Plants," or by Prof. Hehn in his "Kultur-Pflanzen und Haus-
Thiere." It may be that both authors omitted the crop because
its history, so far as Europe is concerned, has definitely ended :
it may be because its history has definitely ended that Dr.
Hurry regarded the crop as especially suitable for his main pur-
pose.
Speaking a year ago, Mr. J. B. S. Haldane remarked, in con-
nection with another crop, that "De Candolle and others had
"supposed that cultivated species had originated where the most
"similar wild form is found" and proceeded to point out that, for
certain crops, this is not always the case. Dr. Hurry must be
placed among the "others" to whom Mr. Haldane referred : he
accepted, from Mr. S. T. Dunn, the statement that Woad is "ap-
''parently native in south-east Russia, where Korshinsky recorded
"it growing as a native." Though De Candolle did not discuss the
origin of Woad in 1855, in that chapter of his " Geographie Bo-
tanique Raisonee" which was republished separately, thirty years
later, as "The Origin of Cultivated Plants," he dealt with the
distribution of Woad in an earlier chapter of the original treatise,
and indicated that, in one of the English localities in which the
plant has appeared spontaneously, it behaved as if it were "estab-
lished." That in south-east Russia Woad is not only "wild,"
but so thoroughly "established" as to appear "native," may
well be believed. But the many classical and renaissance
references to the occurrence of "wild" Woad in countries where
it was cultivated, and the numerous records of localities in
which it still appears "spontaneously," though its cultivation has
ceased, render it as unlikely that cultivation of Woad began in
Russia as that it began in England. As Mr. Haldane has pointed
out, we are indebted to Prof. Vavilov, our foremost living