218 OUR COMMON FRUITS. 



England for the production of melons is not necessary in 

 the warmer parts of Europe ; for though near Paris they 

 are raised equally artificially in hotbeds of dung, tan, or 

 other fermentable material, and under glass or frames of 

 oiled paper, yet in the south of Prance the ground where 

 they are grown is merely ploughed, the seed thrown in, 

 and " Heaven does the rest." . Thus much of care seems to 

 be necessary even in their native East, for Niebuhr men- 

 tions that though several sorts of pumpkins and melons 

 grow naturally in the woods, serving to feed camels, " the 

 proper melons" are planted in the fields, where a great- 

 variety of them is to be found, and in such abundance that 

 the Arabians of all ranks use them for some part of the 

 year as their principal article of food. 



The fact of the male and female flowers of the order 

 CucurbitcG growing apart from each other, though upon 

 the same plant, causes great care to be necessary in order 

 to preserve purity of breed, and G-ourds and Cucumbers 

 especially must be banished from the vicinity of melons, 

 since if plants of the same genus as the latter, however 

 differing in species, should be growing in their neighbour- 

 hood, the pistilliferous melon-flowers are as likely to be- 

 come impregnated with pollen from their blossoms as 

 with that of their own stameniferous ones, and thus some 

 hybrid, and most probably far inferior kind, be produced. 

 It is thus that so many varieties have been created as to 

 have now become almost innumerable, so that, though the 

 broad distinctions of widely different varieties are easily 

 recognizable, it has been found quite impossible to reduce 

 sub-varieties to any sort of order, or give determinate 

 descriptions of them. The French writer, Noisette, de- 

 voted himself for some years to the cultivation of every 

 kind of melon he could procure, with the intention of 

 publishing drawings and descriptions of them, but was 

 forced at last to give up the attempt in despair, acknow- 

 ledging that the further he advanced, the harder he found 

 the task. A work of the kind, entitled, Monographic 

 complete du Melon, has indeed been since published in 

 France by M. Jacquin, but the constancy of the charac- 

 teristics assigned can never be reckoned on with certainty,. 



