LXIII 
WATERMELONS FROM AFRICA 
I SN’T IT ODD that the traveler to interior Africa finds 
watermelons growing wild and covering wide areas! 
Far back in the dark continent, in the regions near the 
equator, is the native home of the watermelon. Like its 
gourd cousins it is a tropical vine. When Livingstone, the 
explorer, first went into Africa, he was surprised to find 
these boundless watermelon patches. He was interested 
to see that natives from considerable distances gathered 
about them and feasted on their fruit. Many of the ani¬ 
mals of the wild, also, depended upon these melons as an 
important item of diet. 
But there was one strange thing about these wild 
watermelons. Some of them were sweet, as are those of 
today, and some of them were quite bitter. The sweet 
ones and the bitter ones looked just alike. If one ate 
watermelon in those regions, it was the part of wisdom to 
go carefully. When one was opened, it was better to test 
it with the mere end of the tongue than to take a greedy 
mouthful at the very beginning. 
These watermelons were doubtless brought down the 
Nile into Egypt in very early times. Pictures in the 
pyramids made many thousands of years ago show water¬ 
melons on the tables. These Egyptians naturally brought 
the seeds of the sweet melons for planting and never grew 
the bitter ones. So, in the course of time, all the culti¬ 
vated melons came to be sweet. With cultivation also 
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