The Bon Jardinier quotes as the principal varieties of this species pumpkin muscade de Provence, pleine de Naples, and de Barbarie. It is needless to say that these names show nothing as to origin. The species is easily recognized by its fine soft down, the pentagonal peduncle which supports the fruit broadening at the summit; the fruit is more or less covered with a glaucous efflorescence, and the flesh is somewhat musk-scented. The lobes of the calyx are often terminated by a leafy border.[1269] Cultivated in all tropical countries, it is less successful than other pumpkins in temperate regions.
Cogniaux[1270] suspects that it comes from the south of Asia, but he gives no proof of this. I have searched through the floras of the old and new worlds, and I have nowhere been able to discover the mention of the species in a truly wild state. The indications which approach most nearly to it are: (1) In Asia, in the island of Bangka, a specimen verified by Cogniaux, and which Miquel[1271] says is not cultivated; (2) in Africa, in Angola, specimens which Welwitsch says are quite wild, but “probably due to an introduction;” (3) in America, five specimens from Brazil, Guiana, or Nicaragua, mentioned by Cogniaux, without knowing whether they were cultivated, naturalized, or indigenous. These indications are very slight. Rumphius, Blume, Clarke (Flora of British India) in Asia, Schweinfurth (Oliver’s Flora of Trop. Africa) in Africa, only know it as a cultivated plant. Its cultivation is recent in China,[1272] and American floras rarely mention the species.
No Sanskrit name is known, and the Indian, Malay, and Chinese names are neither very numerous nor very original, although the cultivation of the plant seems to be more diffused in Southern Asia than in other parts of the tropics. It was already grown in the seventeenth century according to the Hortus Malabaricus, in which there is a good plate (vol. viii. pl. 2). It does not appear that this species was known in the sixteenth century, for Dalechamp’s illustration (Hist., i. p. 616) which Seringe attributed to it has not its true characters, and I can find no other figure which resembles it.
Fig-leaved Pumpkin—Cucurbita ficifolia, Bouché; Cucurbita melanosperma, Braun.
About thirty years ago this pumpkin with black or brown seeds was introduced into gardens. It differs from other cultivated species in being perennial. It is sometimes called the Siamese melon. The Bon Jardinier says that it comes from China. Dr. Bretschneider does not mention it in his letter of 1881, in which he enumerates the pumpkins grown by the Chinese.
Hitherto no botanist has found it wild. I very much doubt its Asiatic origin as all the known perennial species of Cucurbita are from Mexico or California.
Melon—Cucumis Melo, Linnæus.
The aspect of the question as to the origin of the melon has completely changed since the experiments of Naudin. The paper which he published in 1859, in the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, 4th series, vol. ii., on the genus Cucumis, is as remarkable as that on the genus Cucurbita. He gives an account of the observations and experiments of several years on the variability of forms and the crossed fecundation of a multitude of species, breeds, or varieties coming from all parts of the world. I have already spoken (p. 250) of the physiological principle on which he believes it possible to distinguish those groups of forms which he terms species, although certain exceptions have occurred which render the criterion of fertilization less absolute. In spite of these exceptional cases, it is evident that if nearly allied forms can be easily crossed and produce fertile individuals, as we see, for example, in the human species, they must be considered as constituting a single species.
In this sense Cucumis Melo, according to the experiments and observations made by Naudin upon about two thousand living plants, constitutes a species which comprehends an extraordinary number of varieties and even of breeds; that is to say, forms which are preserved by heredity. These varieties or races can be fertilized by each other, and yield varied and variable products. They are classed by the author into ten groups, which he calls canteloups, melons brodés, sucrins, melons d’hiver, serpents, forme de concombre, Chito, Dudaim, rouges de Perse, and sauvages, each containing varieties or nearly allied races. These have been named in twenty-five or thirty different ways by botanists, who, without noticing transitions of form, the faculty of crossing or of change under cultivation, have distinguished as species all the varieties which occur in a given time or place.
Hence it results that several forms found wild, and which have been described as species, must be the types and sources of the cultivated forms; and Naudin makes the very just observation that these wild forms, which differ more or less the one from the other, may have produced different cultivated varieties. This is the more probable that they sometimes inhabit countries remote from each other as Southern Asia and tropical Africa, so that differences in climate and isolation may have created and consolidated varieties.