824 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



after the discovery of America ; and that they are natives of America. 

 He traces out, in this paper, a detailed account of the ancient vegeta- 

 bles ; proves that the musk-melon is still known and cultivated in 

 Greece, and that the modern Greeks call it peponi, a word derived from 

 the ancient name of the fruit ; that the monuments of Egypt, though 

 containing representations of many other plants, have none that canba 

 referred to the peculiar products of which this paper treats ; and that 

 writers on Materia Medica enumerate four kinds of cold and demulcent 

 seeds, namely, those of the citrul, cucumber, gourd and melon ; but 

 make no mention of those of pumpkins and squashes, which are included 

 in the list by modern physicians. 



The common nomenclature of ^the cucurbitaceous plants, in the 

 languages of Europe, has become very much confused, many of the 

 names now embracing species, and even genera, to which they did not 

 originally belong. The European gourd, or calabash, originally a 

 native of southern Asia, took its names mostly from the Latin cucurbit a. 

 It was known to the Anglo-Saxons, and was by them called cyrfoet. 

 Though long cultivated by the Romans, by whom, perhaps, it may 

 have been carried to Britain, it was not generally introduced in West- 

 ern Europe till the time of Charlemagne, who greatly encouraged its 

 cultivation. Tragus, who wrote in the early part of the sixteenth 

 century, gave the first good figure and intelligible description of it. 

 The French call it courge; the English, gourd; the Germans and 

 Swedes, kiirbis; the Dutch, kauwoerde; the Spanish, calo.baza, and the 

 Portuguese, cabaca ; all which names are derived from cucurbitq. The 

 old names, abobora and abobara, by which it was known in Portugal, 

 and the Danish groeskar, are of uncertain origin. Zucche and zucca, 

 the Italian names for the gourd, are probably derived from the Greek 

 sikua. Cilrouelle was the old French name for the water-melon, which 

 is equivalent to the English citrul, and to the pharmaceutical citrullus. 

 All these names were afterwards applied to gourds, pumpkins, and 

 squashes. 



The old botanists, by whom these fruits were first described, were 

 chiefly Brunfelsius, Tragus, Fuchsius, Cordus, Matthiolus, Turner, Do- 

 donaeus, Lobelius, and Dalechamp all of whom, except Lobelius, died 

 before the year 1600. It is worthy of note, that John Eliot, the apos- 

 tle of the Indians, in his translation of the Bible into the language of 

 the Massachusetts Indians, which was first printed in 1GG3, and was 

 the first Bible printed in America, could find no other words for cucum- 

 bers and melons, occurring in Numbers xi. 5, than askootasquash and 

 monaskootasquash, hereby indicating that these fruits were unknown to 

 the Indians by name. It seems, hoAvever, that the Indians had a name 

 for gourd ; for Eliot renders this word quonooask, in Jonah iv. G, 7, 

 9, and 10. Several of the French missionaries in Canada have men- 

 tioned the citrouelles cultivated by the Indians. A number of extracts 

 from early voyagers were cited by Dr. Harris, in this connection, which 

 prove that the vegetables alluded to were in common use among the 

 aborigines through the whole extent of country from Florida to Can- 

 ada, and probably far to the west ; and hence they could not have been 

 derived from Europeans, even if they were not originally indigenous to 

 the soil. 



