| . DeCandolle’s Origin of Cultivated Plants. 375 
those of Europe, where,” as several persons assured him, these 
would not grow. ‘They are of the size of our melons; the 
flesh, yellow as saffron. They usually bake them in the oven, 
etc, Lahontan had as little doubt as Sagard had, that these 
citrowilles (cultivated by the Indians of Canada from the time 
of Cartier, at least) were genuinely “du pays.” 
: As to the Cucurbitacew of Virginia, M. DeCandolle admits, 
only, that the natives, a century after the discovery of Vir- 
a twenty to forty years after the colonization by W. Raleigh, 
w e . 201 
escribes ene “macock gourds” in nearly th 
(Trav. into Virg., p. 72); elsewhere, he says the “ macokos is of 
the form of our pumpions—I must confess, nothing so good,— 
tis of a more waterish taste,” and he mentions also, the “ pum- 
they “seeth, and put into their walnut-milk, and so make a 
kind of toothsome meat” (p. 119). “The Indian Pumpion, the 
water-melon, musk-melon,”’ ete., are named among fruits intro- 
duced into Bermuda, by the English, before 1623 (Smith’s Gen. 
wst., 171).* 
Among Johnson’s additions to Gerarde’s Herball, 1636, there 
L’Ecluse (Clusius) heard of these Macocks in 1591, or earlier. In his Exotica 
41605 ; lib. iii, ¢, 2) he describes a fruit—“ Macocqwer Virginiansium, forte’ —which 
. had Yeon sent hi 
im from London by James Garet, brought from “ the province of 
Wingandecaow, which the English call Virginia.” He conjectured that this might 
be “the fruit whic the natives of that region call Macocqwer” —but his figure and 
. ion do not favor this identification. The fruit, he says, is nearly or : 
lar; four inches in, dia ; with a hard rind, yellowish on the outside; m } 
shaped (“cordis, ut vulgo pingitur, formam referentia”’) 
Seeds, flat and 
L’Ecluse thought it might be one.of the gourds which the natives used for rattles, 
88 the Brazilian their Zamaraca, etc. i old and dried, 
the pulp blackened, the rind covered with a dark membrane, “per quam sparse 
_ Guadam. fibre 4 pediculo ad summum.” This must have been a fruit of Crescen- 
@ cucurbitina, a calabash, which is a native not only of West Indies, but also 
of Southern Florida. i 
