264 OEIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



cultivation early spread into Asia, for there is a Sanskrit 

 name, chayaputa} but the Chinese only received the 

 plant in the tenth century of the Christian era. They 

 cdU it si-Jcua, that is melon of the West.^ 



As the water-melon is an annual, it ripens out of the 

 tropics wherever the summer is suiBciently hot. The 

 modern Greeks cultivate it largely, and call it carpousia 

 or carpousea,^ but this name does not occur in ancient 

 authors, nor even in the Greek of the decadence and of 

 the Middle Ages.* It is the same as the Jcarpus of the 

 Turks of Constantinople,® which we iind again in the 

 Russian arhas,^ and in Bengali and Hindustani as tarbuj 

 turbouz? Another Constantinople name, mentioned by 

 Forskal, chimonico, recurs in Albanian chimico.^ The 

 absence of an ancient Greek name which can with 

 certainty be attributed to this species, seems to show 

 that it was introduced into the Grseco-Roman world 

 about the beginning of the Christian era. The poem 

 Gopa, attributed to Virgil and Pliny, perhaps mentions 

 it (lib. 19, cap. 5), as Naudin thinks, but it is doubtful, 



Europeans have introduced the water-melon into 

 America, where it is now cultivated from Chili to the 

 United States. The jace of the Brazilians, of which 

 Piso and Marcgraf have a drawing, is evidently in- 

 troduced, for the first-named author says it is cultivated 

 and partly naturalized.® 



Cucumber — Gucfwmis sativus, Linnaeus. 



In spite of the very evident difiFerence between the 

 melon and cucumber, which both belong to the genus 

 Cwcwmis, cultivators suppose that the species may be 

 crossed, and that the quality of the melon is thus some- 



• Piddington, Index. 



' Bretsobneider, Study and Value, etc., p. 17. 



^ Heldreioh, Fficmz, d. Attisch. Ehene., p. 591; Nutzpfl. Grieehenl^ 

 p. 50. 



* Langkavel, JBot. der Spat. Qriechen. 



' Forskal, Flora Mgypto-Arabica., part i. p. 34. 



* Nemnich, Polyg. Lexic, i. p. 1309. 



' Piddington, Index ; Pickering, Chronol. Arrang., p. 72. 



• Heldreioh, Nutzpfl., etc., p. 50. 



' "Saliva planta et tractu temporis quasi nativa facta" (Piso, 

 edit. 1658, p. 233). 



