444 Kitchen Garden Esculents of American Origin. (May, 
KITCHEN GARDEN ESCULENTS OF AMERICAN 
ORIGIN. 
I. 
BY E. LEWIS STURTEVANT, M.D. 
N our leading seed catalogues some seventy-two species ot 
plants are usually grouped under kitchen garden esculents. 
Of these we believe seventeen to be of American origin, the 
purslane doubtful, and chives to belong to both the old and the 
new world. Excluding these nineteen, De Candolle assigns, of 
the remainder, twenty-four tq Europe, fifteen to Asia, four to 
Africa, one to Australasia and nine not mentioned. Of this list 
many have both European and Asiatic habitat, or other habitat as 
well as the one under which tabulated. If we compare the im- 
portance of the old and new world vegetables, we find it difficult 
to decide. Certainly the old world cabbage, in its numerous 
races, is of importance in the garden, but so is the new world 
potato. What can be decided, however, is that the peppers, 
pumpkin and squash, tomato, sweet corn and sweet potato are 
representatives of a culture which antedated their introduction 
into the gardens of Europeans, and must have been derived 
through a cultivation as careful as was required for the equal 
development of similar vegetables of old world origin. To ex- 
pect to find the original of our longest cultivated vegetable pro- 
ducts, as wheat or maize, in a plant that can now be recognized 
as a wheat or a maize, seems unphilosophical, as evolution must 
have long since produced changes during that long series of 
selections that have resulted not alone in producing varieties, but 
even races which deserve specific discrimination. On account of 
the light thrown upon an ancient civilization by the knowledge 
of the cultivated plants it has produced, I have thought fit to 
bring together a selection from my notes relating to the esculents 
of American origin which are now to be generally found in our 
= vegetable gardens. 
Alkekengi—The alkekengi, or more usually called strawberry 
tomato in our seed catalogues, is Physalis pubescens L., an Amer- 
ican plant which furnishes one of our minor vegetable products. 
- This plant is said by Gray to be common southward and west- 
_ ward in the United States ; and it is the camaru of Brazil It is 
1 Masters, Treas. of Bot. 
