DESCRIPTION OF CUCURBITA 
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16th and 17th centuries, as well as by the voyageurs and first 
colonists, as natives or denizens of the region in which they were 
found; and (3) that they became known only under American 
names; one of these names (squash) becoming, in popular use, 
generic, and two others (Macock and Cushaw) surviving as 
names of varieties into the present century. 
Through B. L. Sturtevant, “The History of Garden Vegetables,” 
the American Naturalist 24 : 727-744, 1890, we learn that “The 
word squash seems to have been derived from the American 
aborigines, and in particular from those tribes occupying the 
northeastern Atlantic coast, and seems to have been originally 
applied to the summer squash, as by Wood (New Eng. Prosp., 
Pt. II., c. 6.), when he says, “In summer, when their corn is spent, 
isquotusquashes is their best bread, a fruit much like a pumpkin.” 
In 1535 Cartier (Pink. Voy. XII, 656) mentions as found 
among the Indians of Hochelega, now Montreal, “pompions 
gourds.” In 1586 Heriot (Pink. Voy. 12, 596) mentions in Vir- 
ginia “pompions melons and gourds,” and Captain John Smith 
(Pink. Voy. 13, 33) pompions and macocks ; Strachey (Trav. 
into Va., 72), who was in Virginia in 1610, mentions macocks and 
pumpions as differing. 
If we consider the stability of types, and the record of variations 
that appear in cultivated plants, and the additional fact that so 
far as determined, the originals of cultivated types have their 
prototype in nature, and are not products of culture, it seems 
reasonable to suppose that the record of the appearance of types 
will throw light upon the country of their origin. From this 
standpoint, we may hence conclude that, as the present types 
have all been recorded in the Old World since the fifteenth cen- 
tury, and were not recorded before the fourteenth and succeed- 
ing centuries, there must be a connection between the fact of the 
discovery of America, and the fact of the appearance of pumpkins- 
and squashes in Europe. 
DESCRIPTION OF THE GENUS CUCURBITA 
Flores monoid. Masculi in axillis foliorum solitarii ; corolla 
campanulata, usque ad medium 5-loba, staminum connectivis ima 
basi liberis; antheris flexuosis, in columnam cylindricam coalitis 
vel agglutinatis, apice exappendiculatis ; polline magno, globoso, 
subtiliter muricato, multiporosa. Foeminei pariter solitarii, stam- 
inum trium rudimentis instructi, in fundo nectariferi ; stylo crasso, 
