GOURDS AND BOTTLES. 315 



idly growing tropical plants. The best known North American 

 example, in the north and east at least, is the pretty little " prickly 

 cucumber," so commonly used in New England and the Middle 

 States as a climbing plant for arbors and trellis-work. A single 

 species alone reaches England, the familiar bryony ; and, in this 

 case, the necessary modifications and dwarfing of parts to meet 

 the circumstances of a cold climate are at once apparent. The 

 plant has been forced to become a perennial, and store by nutri- 

 ment for coming years in its thick and poisonous roots ; for the 

 short and treacherous English summer would not suffice for it to 

 bring its fruit to maturity in the first season. The berry has also 

 been fined down from its tropical dimensions to about the size of 

 a haricot-bean, in accordance with the needs of English fruit- 

 eating birds, for a reason which we shall fully examine a little 

 later. If one compares these two tiny northern gourds with the 

 great tropical calabashes, often six feet long and eighteen inches 

 round, one will see at once the amount of degradation undergone 

 by the gourd kind on its northward progress, in adaptation to the 

 needs of a chillier climate. 



All the gourd-like fruits are the same in ground-plan, familiar 

 to everybody in cross-section in the case of the unripe cucumber 

 as it appears at the dinner-table. There are always the same three 

 or five rows of flattened seedsi, immersed in soft pulp, and sur- 

 rounded by the fruit with its harder skin, often brilliantly colored 

 with red or yellow. But infinite variations of shape and size are 

 permitted in every direction upon this single original central plan. 

 Nature runs riot in modifications of detail. In order to under- 

 stand them, we must remember that the gourds, as a family, are 

 berry -bearing plants, dependent in most cases for the dispersion 

 of their seeds on the friendly offices of birds or animals. It is 

 to meet the varying views and tastes of these their animate 

 friends and allies that the different hues, coverings, and pulps of 

 the diverse sorts have all been adopted. 



We shall see this better if we look at the one early member of 

 the gourd family which does not seek to attract animals to devour 

 its fruit — the squirting cucumber — and observe the many con- 

 spicuous points in which it broadly differs from all its conge- 

 ners. The squirting cucumber is a scrubby Mediterranean trailer, 

 known to all the world at Nice and Cannes, bearing a long, hairy, 

 and almost prickly fruit, which remains green even when ripe, 

 and is bitter, fetid, and sickening to the senses in all stages. It 

 derives its common name from its curious habit of breaking off 

 short whenever touched, and jumping away from the parent stem, 

 as if alive, while at the same time it squirts out all its seeds, with 

 the surrounding pulp, into its aggressor's face, through the open- 

 ing left by the broken stem. The squirting cucumber, in short. 



