146 PLANTS, SEEDS, AND CURRENTS 



cujete in a collection of Ecuadorian drift fruits and seeds which he 

 had sent on his return to England to the Kew Museum. 



Gourds of sorts have long been known to be thrown up on the 

 coasts of Europe. They are usually referred to as belonging to 

 Lagenaria vulgaris (Cucurbita lagenaria), the calabash gourd of the 

 Old World, and were long ago familiar to Scandinavian naturalists 

 amongst the foreign drift cast up on their shores. Sernander deals 

 with this subject on p. 119 of his work on the Distribution-Biology 

 of the Scandinavian Plant-World (Upsala, 1901), and Hemsley refers 

 to it in his Report on the Botany of the Challenger Expedition 

 (IV., 277). These gourds of the Norwegian beach-drift were first 

 described by Tonning, a pupil of Linnaeus. Found by Strom and 

 Gunnerus in the eighteenth century and by Lindman in recent 

 times, they have been in all cases referred to Lagenaria vulgaris. 

 According to Sernander, the gourds stranded on Scandinavian 

 beaches are usually "worked" calabashes; but he alludes to one 

 that was not carved in this fashion, which contained several seeds. 



It is highly probable, however, that some of the gourds and cala- 

 bashes recorded from the Scandinavian beach-drift were fruits of 

 Crescentia cujete which had been brought in the Gulf Stream drift 

 from the West Indies. By all the authors they are placed amongst 

 the Gulf Stream materials heaped up on those coasts and associated 

 with tropical seeds, such as those of Entada scandens and Mucuna 

 urens, which are recognised as commonly brought by the currents 

 to the Scandinavian shores from the West Indies. It will be shown 

 below that gourds and calabashes of the genus Crescentia are very 

 typical of West Indian beach-drift. The reason why their real 

 character has been overlooked in the case of those found in European 

 beach-drift may be found in the circumstance that unless one is 

 familiar with the fruits in their homes, it is necessary to break open 

 the gourd to identify the genus, and the discoverer of such a stranded 

 fruit on a beach in Europe would probably be loth to spoil his 

 specimen. 



Crescentia includes five species all confined to the tropical regions 

 of the New World. The most familiar species is C. cujete, the Cala- 

 bash tree, which is distributed over the West Indies, and on the 

 American mainland from Mexico to Brazil. One would be inclined 

 to think that man in the past must have assisted in its distribution, 

 since its gourds are extensively employed as water vessels ; but it is 

 noteworthy that another species, C. cucurbitina, L., which is referred 

 to below, has a range almost as wide, notwithstanding that its fruits 

 seem to be of little use to man. The Calabash tree thrives in Bermuda 

 with all the appearance of being indigenous ; but Rein had grounds 

 for suspecting that it had been introduced, and accordingly Hemsley 

 does not include it in the indigenous Bermudian flora (Chall. Bot., 

 II., 9, 55). The gourds of this tree are those most usually found in 

 West Indian beach-drift. However, another species of Crescentia, 

 C. cucurbitina, as above named, is not infrequently represented in 

 the drift of this region. The tree, according to Grisebach, is dis- 

 tributed over the West Indies from Cuba and Jamaica to Trinidad, 

 and reaches the Spanish Main in Venezuela. Urban, who employs 



