I shall first seek for those forms now attributed to the species which have been found growing anywhere in a wild state.
The variety Cucurbita ovifera, Linnæus, was formerly gathered by Lerche, near Astrakhan, but no modern botanist has confirmed this fact, and it is probable it was a cultivated plant. Moreover, Linnæus does not assert it was wild. I have consulted all the Asiatic and African floras without finding the slightest mention of a wild variety. From Arabia, or even from the coast of Guinea to Japan, the species, or the varieties attributed to it, are always said to be cultivated. In India, Roxburgh remarked this, and certainly Clarke, in his recent flora of British India, has good reasons for indicating no locality for it outside cultivation.
It is otherwise in America. A variety, C. texana,[1265] very near to the variety ovata, according to Asa Gray, and which is now unhesitatingly attributed to C. Pepo, was found by Lindheimer “on the edges of thickets, in damp woods, on the banks of the upper Guadaloupe, apparently an indigenous plant.” Asa Gray adds, however, that it is perhaps the result of naturalization. However, as several species of the genus Cucurbita grow wild in Mexico and in the south-west of the United States, we are naturally led to consider the collector’s opinion sound. It does not appear that other botanists found this plant in Mexico, or in the United States. It is not mentioned in Hemsley’s Biologia Centrali-Americana, nor in Asa Gray’s recent flora of California.
Some synonyms or specimens from South America, attributed to C. Pepo, appear to me very doubtful. It is impossible to say what Molina[1266] meant by the names C. Siceratia and C. mammeata, which appear, moreover, to have been cultivated plants. Two species briefly described in the account of the journey of Spix and Martius (ii. p. 536), and also attributed to C. Pepo,[1267] are mentioned among cultivated plants on the banks of the Rio Francisco. Lastly, the specimen of Spruce, 2716, from the river Uaupes, a tributary of the Rio Negro, which Cogniaux[1268] does not mention having seen, and which he first attributed to the C. Pepo, and afterwards to the C. moschata, was perhaps cultivated or naturalized from cultivation, or by transport, in spite of the paucity of inhabitants in this country.
Botanical indications are, therefore, in favour of a Mexican or Texan origin. It remains to be seen if historical records are in agreement with or contrary to this idea.
It is impossible to discover whether a given Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin name for the pumpkin belongs to one species rather than to another. The form of the fruit is often the same, and the distinctive characters are never mentioned by authors.
There is no figure of the pumpkin in the Herbarius Pataviæ Impressus of 1485, before the discovery of America, but sixteenth-century authors have published plates which may be attributed to it. There are three forms of Pepones figured on page 406 of Dodoens, edition 1557. A fourth, Pepo rotundus major, added in the edition of 1616, appears to me to be C. maxima. In the drawing of Pepo oblongus of Lobel, Icones, 641, the character of the peduncle is clearly defined. The names given to these plants imply a foreign origin; but the authors could make no assertions on this head, all the more that the name of “the Indies” applied both to Southern Asia and America.
Thus historical data do not gainsay the opinion of an American origin, but neither do they adduce anything in support of it.
If the belief that it grows wild in America is confirmed, it may be confidently asserted that the pumpkins cultivated by the Romans and in the Middle Ages were Cucurbita maxima, and those of the natives of North America, seen by different travellers in the seventeenth century, were Cucurbita Pepo.
Musk, or Melon Pumpkin—Cucurbita moschata, Duchesne.