CUCURBITACE. 71 
_ with the fruit to ascertain whether it had purgative properties. 
_ Three grain doses thrice daily produced no sensible effect. 
. ‘In Bombay the natives sometimes smoke it as a remedy 
; for asthma. Sir T. Madava Row proposed in the Indian papers 
4 (1888) this remedy for the Crown Prince of Germany.—“Take 
the external cover of the fruit of 7’. palmata, powder it, and 
inhale the smoke of it, like that of tobacco. Do this three 
times a day for three days. This is found in an important 
work in Sanskrit on medicine.” The root with an equal portion 
F of colocynth root is rubbed into a paste and applied io car- 
_ buncles ; combined with equal portions of the three myrobalans 
and turmeric, it affords an infusion which is flavoured with honey 
_ and given in gonorrhea, 7. palmata is supposed by some to 
be the Hanzal ahmar or red colocynth of Mahometan writers. 
Description.—The fruit is round, oval, or pyriform, the 
: size of a small apple, crimson when fresh, of a dull orange 
_ colour when dry, marked at one end by a deep cicatrix with 
_ sharp raised edges, at the other there is a prominence to which 
a portion of the stalk sometimes remains attached. In the dry 
ruit, which has a thin, brittle, very bitter shell, the segments 
(of pulp with their seeds are loose, so that the contents of the 
gourd rattle. If a dry segment be soaked in water it soon 
_ Softens, yielding a dark green pulp which smells like savine, 
_ and has an acrid and bitter taste. The seeds, ranging in num- 
' ber from 60 to 100 in each fruit, are flat, but very 
' irregular in shape, generally somewhat triangular, and ave (2) 
 7-16ths of an inch in length ; they have a hard blackish shell, 
and sweet oily kernel. The vine is perennial, often as thick as 
_ @ man’s arm; it has a warty grey bark, marked by seven deep 
_ longitudinal fissures, which correspond to the medullary diyi- 
sions between seven wedge-shaped woody and vascular bundles 
_ into which the stem is divided. The vine is not bitter. 
