Botany of Tomato 



265 



America, of which one or two are grown for food. The 

 tomato was cultivated or utilized by American aborigines, but 

 it is doubtful whether domestication was really ancient. 



L. esculentum. Mill. Gard. Diet. No. 2. 1768. (Solanum 

 Lycopersiciim, Linn. Sp. PI. 185. L. esculentum var. milgare, 

 Alef. Landw. Fl., 135. 1866.) Tomato. Diffuse hairy-pubes- 

 cent, grayish-green, the branches spreading but ascending, 

 herbage strong-scented, perennial or at least plur-annual : 

 leaves 6 to 18 in. long, odd-pinnate, leaflets stalked, with 

 smaller nearly or quite entire ones Interposed; main leaflets 

 alternate or subopposite, 5 to 9, conduplicate or tending to 

 curl or roll inward, ovate or oblong, acute or acuminate, bluntly 

 toothed or jagged, the base unequal and sometimes with a 

 supplementary secondary leaflet on one side: flowers nod- 

 ding, 3 to 7 on forking and sometimes leaf -bearing peduncles 

 borne near a leaf-insertion but on the opposite side of the 

 stem, the yellow corolla % in. and more across ; calyx (much 

 enlarging in fruit) green and hairy, cleft nearly to the base 

 into 5 or 6 lance-linear acute lobes ; corolla cleft into 5 or 6 

 long-pointed narrow lobes about as long as the calyx ; stamens 

 5 or 6, with very short filaments, the long yellow green-pointed 

 anthers connivent about the style : fruit a succulent red or 

 yellow angled compressed berry subtended by the lengthened 

 spreading calyx-lobes: seeds obovate, flat, densely hairy, 1/6 

 in. or more long, weighing 1 to 3 mg., and holding vitality 

 4 or 5 years. — Western South America. The plant here taken 

 as the type of the variable species is the tomato of a hun- 

 dred years and more ago which bore depressed (endwise flat- 

 tened) fruits that were much furrowed or lobed on the sides, 

 and presumably with the gray-green herbage, erect shoots and 

 conduplicate leaflets that some of the last varieties of this 

 old race bore when the writer began to study tomatoes now 

 nearly forty years ago. The Large Red tomato, which was 

 the prevailing variety 50 years ago, is shown in Fig. 150. 

 Miller, in defining the species L. esculentum, described the' 

 fruit as " compressed at both ends, and deeply furrowed over 

 all the sides." These lobes probably represent the additional 



