740 The American Naturalist. [August, 
Vilmorin. The Belgian name appears as cauwoord in Lyte, 
1586; and the Spanish name, calabassa, with slight change of 
spelling, has remained constant from 1561 to 1864, as has the 
zucca of the Italians and the £zrs of the Germans. 
The /agezaria is but rarely cultivated in the United States, 
except as an ornamental plant, and as such shares a place with 
the small hard-shelled cucurbita which are known as fancy 
gourds. In some localities, however, under the name of sugar 
trough gourd, a lagenaria is grown for the use of the shell of the 
fruit for the purposes of a pail; and what is worthy of note, this 
type of the fruit does not exactly appear in the drawings of the 
botanists of the early period, nor in the seed catalogues of Europe 
at the present time. In the Tupi Dictionary of Father Ruiz 
de Montaga,'” 1639, among the gourd names are “ iacvi-gourd, 
like a great dish or bowl," which may mean this form. When 
we examine descriptions, this gourd may be perhaps recognized 
in Columella's account, “Sive globosi corporis, atque utero 
minium quae vasta tumescit,”"! and used for storing pitch or 
honey; yet a reference to his prose description’ rather contra- 
dicts the conjecture, and leads us to believe that he only describes 
the necked form, and this form only seems to have been known 
to Palladius? Pliny ?* describes two kinds, the one climbing, 
the other trailing. Walafridus Strabo," in the ninth century, 
seems to describe the g/ebeia of Pliny as a curcurbita, and the 
cameraria as a pepo; the former apparently a necked form, and 
the latter one in which the neck has mostly disappeared, leaving 
an oval fruit. Albertus Magnus,'* in the thirteenth century, de- 
scribes the cucurbita as bearing its seed “in vase magno," which 
implies the necked form. The following types are illustrated in 
the various herbalists which I have in my library : 
130 Quoted by Gray and Trumbull, Am. Jour. of Sci., May, 1883, 372. 
131 Columella. Lib. X., c. 383. 
132 Columella, Lib. XI., c. 3. 
183 Palladius. Lib. IX., c. 9. 
14 Pliny. Lib. XIX., c. 24. 
135 Walfridus Strabo. Hortulus in Macer Floridus, Ed. of Silling., 1832, pp. 146, 147. 
136 Albertus Magnus. Jessen Ed., 1867, 500 
