Luffa Plant. 15 



LUFFA PLANT. 



By " Alpha." 



The writer is a constant reader of the Gardeners' Monthly, aiid 

 always welcomes its advent, and peruses its varied and useful articles 

 vvith interest. 



In the October number occurs an amusing communication by L. B., 

 on the subject of the Cacoon vine^ which deserves some comment, 

 especially as the editor has allowed it to pass without remarks, which 

 he is so prone to make. 



The author, with a grand flourish, parades his profound research and 

 industrious efibrts to inform himself by consulting many dictionaries, 

 all to no purpose ; in one only could he find the name " Cacoon — a 

 name for the seeds of the Entada gigalobium., which are used for 

 making purses, scent-bottles, &c." If such articles are meant to be 

 made of the material under discussion it is a great mistake. The seeds 

 of the Etitada are of a large size, heart-shaped, one and a half inches 

 in diameter, and three fourths of an inch thick in the centre, very finn 

 in texture, and of a dark, shining color, darker than the horse-chestnut ; 

 they grow in bean-sliaped pods, more than twelve inches long, and two 

 inches wide, of a thick coriaceous substance. The outer case of this 

 seed is a beautiful polished shell. 



If L. B., instead of consulting commercial and literary dictionaries, 

 had turned his attention to tlie more appropriate botanical work, 

 Loudon's Encyclopsedia of Plants, at page 80S, he would liave been 

 rewarded by the discovery of its proper name — Moino7'dlca Lttffa., 

 Egyptian, E. Indies. Had he prosecuted his search farther, he woidd 

 have found the plant figured in Rumphius's Herbarium Amboinense, 

 vol. v., plate 147. Philip Miller adds, as synonymes, Lnffa (^gyp- 

 tiaca^ L. arabum. Grisebach, in Flora of the British West India 

 Islands, page 2S6, under the Cucurbitacece, remarks among the uses 

 for which this tribe is cultivated, " that the shells of the towel gourd 

 or strainer vine, and others, are for domestic purposes." And of the 

 fruit of the I., actdangula^ that " it is of the size of a cucumber, at 



