GOURDS AND BOTTLES. 311 



either to barbarous or civilized people. For even that familiar 

 brown glass receptacle out of which we pour Bass's beer at our 

 modern dinner-tables, derives its shape ultimately from the Medi- 

 terranean gourd ; and every other form of bottle in the known 

 world is equally based, in the last resort, upon some member or 

 other of the gourd family. 



I don't believe, indeed, the importance of gourds, as a class, 

 in the history of civilization has ever yet been properly recog- 

 nized by the annalists of culture. On them, it would seem, with 

 their close congeners the tropical calabashes, the entire art and 

 mystery of pottery ultimately depend. It is possible to trace back 

 almost every vase or other fictile vessel manufactured to-day at 

 Burslem or at Vallauris to this most primitive and simple of all 

 possible water-jars. It behooves us, therefore, in an epoch of pot- 

 hunters, to know something of the nature of this earliest pot, as a 

 moment in the evolution of our existing civilization. A plant on 

 which so ancient and universal an art at last bases itself may well 

 claim some twenty minutes of our scanty leisure in this aesthetic, 

 refined, and pottery-worshiping century. 



The gourd, then, to begin at the beginning, is of course a cu- 

 cumber by family, belonging to the same great group of rapidly 

 growing and large-leaved climbers as the melon, the pumpkin, 

 and the vegetable marrow. All these plants are mere annuals, 

 and they are remarkable among their class for the stature they 

 attain in a single year, for the size of their leaves, and for the big- 

 ness of the fruit, in comparison with the short time it takes in 

 growing. Only the sunflower and Indian corn can equal them at 

 all in this last respect. Vegetative energy is the strong point of 

 the gourds. They have a power of growth and a vigor of consti- 

 tution nowhere surpassed among yearling plants. It was not 

 without reason in the nature of things that the creeper which 

 grew up in a night and overshadowed Jonah should have been 

 figured by the Hebrew allegory as a gourd. No other plant grows 

 so fast, or produces in so short a space of time so luxuriant a can- 

 opy of shady foliage. 



The true gourds, in fact, have adapted themselves entirely to 

 the climbing habit. This is in itself a half-parasitic mode of exist- 

 ence to which many plants have taken as a bid for life, because it 

 saves them all the trouble and expense of producing a stout and 

 woody stem for their own support. The way the gourds climb is 

 by means of spiral, curled tendrils, which are in reality small 

 abortive stipules or leaf -appendages, specialized for the work of 

 clinging to the external object, be it bough or stem of some other 

 plant, over which the beautiful parasite rapidly spreads itself. 

 The tendrils push themselves out on every side, revolving as they 

 go, till they reach some slender twig or leaf -stalk to which they 



