CUCUMBER. 127 



of blood, by keeping him some weeks on cucumbers, 

 which he ate without any other preparation than peeling,, 

 and took no other diet, except a few biscuits and water. 

 Cowper has beautifully described the method 



To raise the prickly and green-coated gourd, 

 So grateful to the palate ; and when rare, 

 So coveted ; else base and disesteem'd, 

 Food for the vulgar merely. 



The Rev. Griffith Hughes, in his Natural History of 

 Barbadoes, mentions the wild cucumber-vine as indige- 

 nous to that part of the world. It is called by Father 

 Plumier anguria fructu echinato eduli. He describes the 

 fruit a.s a small cucumber, whose surface is covered with 

 many soft-pointed prickles : it is sometimes eaten ; but 

 is esteemed to be of too cold a nature to be wholesome. 



Lunan, in his Hortus Jamaicensis, mentions the small 

 wild cucumber as being a native of Jamaica, where it 

 grows very plentifully, and is often used with other herbs 

 in soups, and is a very agreeable ingredient : the rind is 

 thickly beset with blunt prickles. Sloane mentions it as 

 a pale green oval fruit, as big as a walnut, and says it is 

 eaten very greedily by sheep and cattle. 



The ancients used the wild cucumber as a sovereign 

 remedy in various complaints. " The best kind/' says 

 Pliny, " was found in Arabia, and the next about Gyrene 

 and Arcadia." 



It was from the juice of these cucumbers that they 

 procured the medicine called elaterium, which, Theophras- 

 tus states, could be kept good two hundred years ; and for 

 fifty years it would be so strong and full of virtue, that 

 it would put out the light of a candle or lamp. Pliny 

 says, " to try good elaterium, it is set near to a lighted 

 candle, which it causes to sparkle upwards and down- 

 wards." 



Elaterium was used not only as a purgative, but against 



