342 REVIEWS. 



Persea gratissima, Alligator Pear of the English, 1' Avoeat 

 of the French ; a singular corruption of a native name, as De 

 Oandolle remarks, which had no more to do with an alligator 

 than with a lawyer. Our author does not carry back the 

 native Mexican name quite to its original, which was " Ahua- 

 cahuitl " corrupted by the Spaniards into " Aquacate," 

 " Avogade," etc. Champlain, who saw it in Mexico in 1599 

 or 1600, calls the fruit " Accoiates " and " Acoyates " ; " Voy. 

 to the W. Indies"' [Hakluyt Soc, 1859], p. 28. 



Oviedo described " the wild pear-tree of the main land," in 

 1526. It grew " in the province of Castilo del Ora (Panama), 

 in the sierras of Capira and the country of the cacique of 

 Juanaga," etc. In the revision of his first work, in 1535, he 

 adds, that he had, some years before, seen these trees culti- 

 vated by the Indians in Nicaragua (Historia, lib. ix. c. 22). 

 It was still a tree of " Terra firma " — not yet introduced 

 into the Islands. Clusius saw it in a garden in Valencia — 

 " said to be brought from America " — thirty-five years ear- 

 lier than the date (1601) mentioned by De Candolle. He 

 described the Persea in the first edition of his " Historia 

 rariorum Stirpium," 1576 (lib. i. c. 2), published five years 

 after his journey in Spain. 



PassiJ/ora. — This genus is wholly omitted by De Candolle ; 

 unaccountably so, considering how much Granadillas have 

 been cultivated and prized in tropical countries. A note on 

 the subject may not be out of place, as a species was culti- 

 vated by our own Indians. 



•which M. De Candolle refers — the " Historia Stirpium," attributed to 

 J. Bauhin, hut published long after his death (in 1551), with large additions 

 by his son-in-law Cherler, and by Chabrseus and Graffenreid. Guillandi- 

 nus, of Padua, in a treatise " De Papyro," 1572, named the " Tumatle 

 Americanorum " as a species of " Pomum Amoris or Solanum pomiferum " ; 

 and earlier, Matthioli had described it (Comment, in Dioscor., ed. 1559, 

 p. 537J as a " kind of Mala insana " [Solanum Melongena], which was 

 " beginning to be imported " into Italy, and which was " popularly called 

 Pomi d'oro, that is, Mala aurea." 



Anguillara may have confounded the Tomato with another of the 

 American Solanacea, introduced at about the same period — the Thorn 

 Apple {Datura Stramonium) which Guillandinus (1572) named Mala 

 Peruviana, and the French called "Pomme de Perou." — J. H. T. 



