A variety with bitter fruit is common in British India[1341] in a wild state, since there is no inducement to cultivate it. It exists also in the Sunda Islands. It is Luffa amara, Roxburgh, and L. sylvestris, Miquel. L. subangulata, Miquel, is another variety which grows in Java, which M. Cogniaux also unites with the others from authentic specimens which he saw.
M. Naudin does not say what traveller gives the plant as wild in Senegambia; but he says the negroes call it papengaye, and as this is the name of the Mauritius planters,[1342] it is probable that the plant is cultivated in Senegal, and perhaps naturalized near dwellings. Sir Joseph Hooker, in the Flora of Tropical Africa, gives the species, but without proof that it is wild in Africa, and Cogniaux is still more brief. Schweinfurth and Ascheron[1343] do not mention it either as wild or cultivated in Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia. There is no trace of its ancient cultivation in Egypt.
The species has often been sent from the West Indies, New Granada, Brazil, and other parts of America, but there is no indication that it has been long in these places, nor even that it occurs at a distance from gardens in a really wild state.
The conditions or probabilities of origin, and of date of culture, are, it will be seen, identical for the two cultivated species of luffa. In support of the hypothesis that the latter is not of African origin, I may say that the four other species of the genus are Asiatic or American; and as a sign that the cultivation of the luffa is not very ancient, I will add that the form of the fruit varies much less than in the other cultivated cucurbitacea.
Snake Gourd—Trichosanthes anguina, Linnæus.
An annual creeping Cucurbitacea, remarkable for its fringed corolla. It is called petole in Mauritius, from a Java name. The fruit, which is something like a long fleshy pod of some leguminous plants, is eaten cooked like a cucumber in tropical Asia.
As the botanists of the seventeenth century received the plant from China, they imagined that the plant was indigenous there, but it was probably cultivated. Dr. Bretschneider[1344] tells us that the Chinese name, mankua, means “cucumber of the southern barbarians.” Its home must be India, or the Indian Archipelago. No author, however, asserts that it has been found in a distinctly wild state. Thus Clarke, in Hooker’s Flora of British India, ii. p. 610, says only, “India, cultivated.” Naudin,[1345] before him, said, “Inhabits the East Indies, where it is much cultivated for its fruits. It is rarely found wild.” Rumphius[1346] is not more positive for Amboyna. Loureiro and Kurz in Cochin-China and Burmah, Blume and Miquel in the islands to the south of Asia, have only seen the plant cultivated. The thirty-nine other species of the genus are all of the old world, found between China or Japan, the west of India and Australia. They belong especially to India and the Malay Archipelago. I consider the Indian origin as the most probable one.
The species has been introduced into Mauritius, where it sows itself round cultivated places. Elsewhere it is little diffused. No Sanskrit name is known.
Chayote, or Choco—Sechium edule Swartz.
This plant, of the order Cucurbitaceæ, is cultivated in tropical America for its fruits, shaped like a pear, and tasting like a cucumber. They contain only one seed, so that the flesh is abundant.