Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/126

 THE PREHISTOKIC WORSHIP OP THE HOP AMONG THE SLAVS, AND ITS RELATION TO SOMA.

BY ERASMUS MAJEWSKI.

The origin of the hop remains for the present an unsolved riddle in botany. The origin of the name of the plant is likewise unknown. The majority of botanists, indeed, with Alphonse de Candolle at their head, reckon it to the European and American flora, but this opinion is not so much based upon ascertained facts as on the absence of proof to the contrary. The conclusion rests chiefly on the circumstance that hop is found wild everywhere in Europe, and grows even in countries where it never has been cultivated; whereas, it is altogether absent in the East of the Old World. This fact, nevertheless, does not settle the question. If we consider the wild hop in any country as degenerated, the presence of the uncultivated form cannot prove the hypothesis of de Candolle. Then we have no answer to the question, where in its present geographical extent, to find the primordial origin of the plant.

The ancient Babylonian, Assyrian, Semitic, Egyptian, and even Greek and Latin monuments prove that the southern and south-eastern ancient peoples did not know the plant, the blossom itrobil of which could be used as an agreeable ingredient of beer. In the earlier middle ages of Europe, silence reigns on the subject of hop. The first traces appear in Central Europe about the 9th and 10th centuries.

In the documents of that period and the following we find humularia, as well as other Latin names in a curiously undetermined condition: humulus, humols, humele, omulo, umlo, fumlo, and even hoppa, and mention is made of particular duties being levied on hops. Entire silence is, however, kept by contemporary writers as to the beginnings of hop; we are not told if the indigenous plant was cultivated, or if it was