CHAPTER VII 

 THE PAPAYA AND ITS RELATIVES 



THE papaya (sometimes called papaw) and the passion- 

 flowers are closely related, and the fruit-bearing kinds are 

 treated together in this chapter. Some botanists place them 

 all in one family even though the papaya is an erect plant and 

 the passion-flowers are tendril-bearing vines ; but recent botan- 

 ists separate them into the Caricacere (or Papayaceae) and 

 Passifloracea?. In botanical structure, the fruits are very sim- 

 ilar, and they are related not distantly to the Cucurbitacea3 

 (pumpkins and melons). 



THE PAPAYA (Plate XI) 

 (Carica Papaya, L.) 



"There is also a fruite," wrote the Dutch traveler Linschoten 

 in 1598, "that came out of the Spanish Indies, brought from 

 beyond ye Philipinas or Lusons to Malacca, and fro thence 

 to India, it is called Papaios, and is very like a Mellon. . . and 

 will not grow, but alwaies two together, that is male and 

 female . . . and when they are diuided and set apart one from 

 the other, then they yield no fruite at all." 



The facility with which the papaya is propagated by means 

 of its seeds made possible its rapid dissemination throughout 

 the tropics, when once the Discovery had opened up routes 

 of travel between its native home in the Western Hemisphere 

 and the regions in Asia, Africa, and Polynesia favorable to its 

 growth. In many places it early attained the position of im- 

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