then in France and England. The}' were introduced into England as 
early as 1596. An eighteenth century English gardener writes about them, 
together with egg plants, as great curiosities for the garden. An English 
herbalist says tomatoes were used in hot countries ‘‘to cool and quench 
the heat and thirst of their hot stomaches.” The first tomato was com- 
mercially canned in 1847. The average yield of salable fruit for the 
United States is probably around 6,000 pounds per acre, but a not at all 
exceptional yield is 30,000 to 40,000 pounds. Over 500 varieties of toma- 
toes are known to the American trade at present, whereas fifty years age 
there were a dozen or so. 
Red ^peppers were as popular as a food condiment among the ancient 
inhabitants of the Americas as they are to-day among their descendants in 
Mexico and the Andean highlands in the form of Chili con carne, hot 
tamales and other mouth-burning food preparations. Toward the end 
of the sixteenth century, European physicians regarded red peppers as a 
cure-all for various ills, such as dropsy, colic, ague, tooth-ache, quinsy, 
tropical fevers, gout, paralysis, and many others — a sort of primitive 
“Peruna.” At this period, the “dietitians” believed red peppers aided di- 
gestion, instead of the opposite as now. Thus the fashions change. Ac- 
cording to various authorities, tropical South America, especially Brazil, 
was the original home of the various species or forms which through 
crossing and natural variation, have given us our present varieties, some- 
thirty of which are quite common. 
Though closely related botanically to the tomato, potato and pepper, 
the egg plant is not an American. Its original home is supposed to have 
been India, where a closely related wild species Solatium insanum, is 
quite common. The relationship of the egg plant to these three vegetables 
as well as to tobacco is exemplified by grafting all of them into one 
plant, the result being a single plant bearing egg plants, tomatoes, tobacco 
leaves, and potatoes, each after its kind — a startling curiosity perhaps, 
but not commercially valuable. The egg plant was cultivated in north 
Africa in the ninth century but was not introduced into England until 
1597. In India it is often known as "brinjal” and the natives eat them 
in curries or roasted in red-hot ashes and mashed with salt, lime juice, 
onions and chillies. In France they are called “aubergines” and the white 
fruited varieties are preferred. 
Pumpkins, vegetable marrows, and most of the summer squashes are 
regarded by the botanists who classify plants as forms of one species, 
Cucurbita Pcpo, probably native to tropical America, though no wild 
forms are known with certainty. From a geneticist’s standpoint it is 
extremely doubtful that forms with such extremely diverse characters, 
such as those of the field pumpkin and the Scalloped Bush or Patty Pan 
summer squashes, belong to the same species or trace their origin back to 
the same or similar wild ancestors. Both pumpkins and summer squashes, 
however, appear to have been grown by the Indians in their corn patches 
all along the Atlantic sea coast when the European colonists landed and 
settled this section. The island of Nantucket is said to have had a warty 
variety, which gave rise to our common field pumpkin. During the Ameri- 
can Revolution, a crude form of sugar and a sweet syrup were obtained 
