272 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



cultivate it. It exists also in the Sunda Islands. It 

 is Luffa amara, Roxburgh, and L. sylvestris, Miquel. 

 L. suhangidata, Miquel, is another variety which grows 

 in Java, which M. Oogniaux also unites with the others 

 from authentic specimens which he saw. 



M. Naudin does not say what traveller gives the 

 plant as wild in Senegambia ; but he says the negroes 

 call it loo.pengaye, and as this is the name of the 

 Mauritius planters/ it is probable that the plant is 

 cultivated in Senegal, and perhaps naturalized near 

 dwellings. Sir Joseph Hooker, in the Flora of Tropical 

 Africa, gives the species, but without proof that it 

 is wild in Africa, and Cogniaux is still more brief 

 Schweinfurth and Ascheron ^ do not mention it either 

 as wild or cultivated in Egypt, Nubia, and Abj^ssinia. 

 There is no trace of its ancient cultivation in Egypt. 



The species has often been sent from the West Indies, 

 New Granada, Brazil, and other parts of America, but 

 there is no indication that it has been long in these places, 

 nor even that it occurs at a distance from gardens in a 

 really wild state. 



The conditions or probabilities of origin, and of date 

 of culture, are, it w^ill be seen, identical for the two 

 cultivated species of luffa. In support of the hypothesis 

 that the latter is not of African origin, I may say that 

 the four other species of the genus are Asiatic or 

 American ; and as a sign that the cultivation of the luffa 

 is not very ancient, I will add that the form of the fruit 

 varies much less than in the other cultivated cucar- 

 bitacea. 



Snake Gourd — TricJiosanthes anguina, Linnaeus. 



An annual creeping Giicurhitacea, remarkable for its 

 fringed corolla. It is called ]-)etole in Mauritius, from a 

 Java name. The fruit, which is somethino- like a hnor 

 fleshy pod of some leguminous plants, is eaten cooked 

 like a cucumber in tropical Asia. 



As the botanists of the seventeenth century received 

 the plant from China, they imagined that the plant w^as 



' * Bojer, Hort. Maurit. 



' Schweinfurth and Ascherson, Avfzdhlung, p. 268. 



