THE MANGOSTEEN 



"Queen of Fruits" Now Almost Confined to Malayan Archipelago, But Can Be 

 Acclimated in Many Parts of Tropics — Experiments in America — 

 Desirability of Widespread Cultivation. 



David Fairchild 



Agricultural Explorer in Charge, Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, 



Bureau of Plant Industry, IL S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C. 



ONE of the first questions which 

 a traveller in the Malay Archi- 

 pelago may expect old residents 

 to ask him, is, "Have you 

 eaten a mangosteen?" If he has not, 

 he may then expect to hear an enthusi- 

 astic description, more or less vague, 

 of the deliciousness of what has justly 

 been called the "queen of fruits." 



It is a mistake to think that you have 

 only to cross the line into the oriental 

 tropics to have bunches and basketfuls 

 of this fruit offered to you at the ridicu- 

 lously low price of Eastern Shore 

 peaches in the height of the season. 

 Outside of the Straits Settlements, 

 Java, Sumatra and the Moluccas the 

 fruit is a rare one and as much sought 

 after by the resident of the country as 

 it is by the visitor. 



It is not difficult for one who has 

 tasted it to understand why the mango- 

 steen is such a general favorite, although 

 to give someone else an idea of its 

 qualities is by no means an easy task. 



There are many people who never 

 acquire a taste for any of the fruits 

 of the tropics. The Prussian finds 

 them insipid in comparison with his 

 plums and prunes, and the wall peaches 

 of Kent are considered by the English 

 as immeasurably superior. Tropical 

 fruits are often stigmatized as insipid, 

 resinous, mawkish, or too sweet. There 

 are, it is true, many which are open to 

 these objections, but it must be remem- 

 bered that most of the fruits of the 



tropical zone are ungrafted seedlings 

 analagous to our wild apples; and the 

 wonder is that they prove as good as 

 they do. 



MANGOSTEEN UNIQUE 



The mangosteen, however, though 

 belonging to the category of a strictly 

 tropical fruit, is so different from the 

 majority of them as to deserve the 

 special place accorded to it by all who 

 have ever tasted its snowy white 

 pulp. It outranks in delicacy, if not 

 all other fruits in the world, certainly 

 all others of the tropical zone,^ and it 

 is a joy to the eye as well as to the palate 

 to feast on mangosteens. 



This delicious fruit is about the size 

 of a mandarin orange, round and 

 slightly flattened at each end, with a 

 smooth, thick rind, rich red-purple in 

 color, with here and there a bright, 

 hardened drop of the yellow juice 

 which marks some injury to the rind 

 when it was young. As these mangos- 

 teens are sold in the Dutch East Indies — 

 heaped up on fruit baskets, or made 

 into long, regular bunches with thin 

 strips of braided bamboo, — they are 

 as strikingly handsome as anything 

 of the kind could well be, but it is only 

 when the fruit is opened that its real 

 beauty is seen. The rind is thick and 

 tough, and to get at the pulp inside 

 requires a circular cut with a sharp 

 knife to lift the top half off like a cap, 

 exposing the white segments, five, six 



1 This has been recognized by travelers in the East from the very earliest times. Jacobus 

 Bontius, in his Hist. Nat. et Medic. Indiae Orientalis, VI, 28, 115 (pub. in 1631), wrote enthusi- 

 astically : 



Cedant Hespcrii longe hinc, mala aurea, fructus, 



Ambrosia pascit Mangostan et nectare divos — 



Inter omnes Indiae fructus longe sapidissimus. 339 



