It must indeed be granted that this diversity in the names of cultivated plants, which so strongly contrasts with the essential agreement in the appellations of domestic animals, does not absolutely preclude the supposition of a common original agriculture.

In the circumstances of primitive times transport and acclimatizing are more difficult in the case of plants than of animals; and the cultivation of rice among the Indians, that of wheat and spelt among the Greeks and Romans, and that of rye and oats among the Germans and Celts, may all be traceable to a common system of primitive tillage.

On the other hand the name of one cereal common to the Greeks and Indians only proves, at the most, that before the separation of the stocks they gathered and ate the grains of barley and spelt growing wild in Mesopotamia,( 3) not that they already cultivated grain.

While, however, we reach no decisive result in this way, a further light is thrown on the subject by our observing that a number of the most important words bearing on this province of culture occur certainly in Sanscrit, but all of them in a more general signification.
-Agras-among the Indians denotes a level surface in general; -kurnu-, anything pounded; -aritram-, oar and ship; -venas-, that which is pleasant in general, particularly a pleasant drink.

The words are thus very ancient; but their more definite application to the field (-ager-), to the grain to be ground (-granum-), to the implement which furrows the soil as the ship furrows the surface of the sea (-aratrum-), to the juice of the grape (-vinum-), had not yet taken place when the earliest division of the stocks occurred, and it is not to be wondered at that their subsequent applications came to be in some instances very different, and that, for example, the corn intended to be ground, as well as the mill for grinding it (Gothic -quairinus-, Lithuanian -girnos-,( 4)) received their names from the Sanscrit -kurnu-.