idly growing tropical plants. The best known North American example, in the north and east at least, is the pretty little "prickly cucumber," so commonly used in New England and the Middle States as a climbing plant for arbors and trellis-work. A single species alone reaches England, the familiar bryony; and, in this case, the necessary modifications and dwarfing of parts to meet the circumstances of a cold climate are at once apparent. The plant has been forced to become a perennial, and store by nutriment for coming years in its thick and poisonous roots; for the short and treacherous English summer would not suffice for it to bring its fruit to maturity in the first season. The berry has also been fined down from its tropical dimensions to about the size of a haricot-bean, in accordance with the needs of English fruiteating birds, for a reason which we shall fully examine a little later. If one compares these two tiny northern gourds with the great tropical calabashes, often six feet long and eighteen inches round, one will see at once the amount of degradation undergone by the gourd kind on its northward progress, in adaptation to the needs of a chillier climate.

All the gourd-like fruits are the same in ground-plan, familiar to everybody in cross-section in the case of the unripe cucumber as it appears at the dinner-table. There are always the same three or five rows of flattened seeds, immersed in soft pulp, and surrounded by the fruit with its harder skin, often brilliantly colored with red or yellow. But infinite variations of shape and size are permitted in every direction upon this single original central plan. Nature runs riot in modifications of detail. In order to understand them, we must remember that the gourds, as a family, are berry-bearing plants, dependent in most cases for the dispersion of their seeds on the friendly offices of birds or animals. It is to meet the varying views and tastes of these their animate friends and allies that the different hues, coverings, and pulps of the diverse sorts have all been adopted.

We shall see this better if we look at the one early member of the gourd family which does not seek to attract animals to devour its fruit-the squirting cucumber-and observe the many conspicuous points in which it broadly differs from all its congeners. The squirting cucumber is a scrubby Mediterranean trailer, known to all the world at Nice and Cannes, bearing a long, hairy, and almost prickly fruit, which remains green even when ripe, and is bitter, fetid, and sickening to the senses in all stages. It derives its common name from its curious habit of breaking off short whenever touched, and jumping away from the parent stem, as if alive, while at the same time it squirts out all its seeds, with the surrounding pulp, into its aggressor's face, through the opening left by the broken stem. The squirting cucumber, in short,

if I may venture so to describe it, is the skunk among vegetables. Its object in life, its sole aim and desire, is to deter animals from eating its fruit and seeds; and therefore it makes itself as unpleasant and as inconspicuous as it possibly can. It is green, so that animals may not readily detect its presence among its leaves; it is spine-clad, so that they may not attack it with their tender noses; it is nasty to the taste and disagreeable to the smell, so that they may avoid its neighborhood when once they have learned to know its personal peculiarities. If a goat or a donkey, wandering among the scrub, chances to touch the long, trailing branches, the cucumber squirts out its juice in his eyes, and at the same time sows its seeds all round on a spot where no hostile creature is likely to interfere with them. We have here in a very extreme form a specimen of that rare type of succulent fruit which does not lay itself out at all to attract the attention of friendly animals, but, on the contrary, endeavors energetically to repel them.

The mass of the gourd-kind, however, pursue the exactly opposite tactics. They have learned by experience to imitate rather a policy of conciliation, and to turn the birds, quadrupeds, and fruit-eating animals generally in their environment from deadly foes into friendly disseminators. For this purpose, their fruits, when ripe and fit for seeding, become red, yellow, pink, or orange, though they only assume these brilliant hues at the exact moment when the seeds are ready to be severed from the parent stem and dispersed for germination. Till that time, they remain green and sour, or at least tasteless. The seeds in these cases are surrounded by a soft, sweet pulp, especially noticeable in the melon and the watermelon; and this pulp the plant gives in, so to speak, as an inducement to animals to disseminate its seeds over the surrounding country. It has learned organically the value of rotation of crops. It desires fresh soil in which to expand. The actual seeds themselves, however, are not sweet; they are inclosed in a hard and somewhat horny or leathery shell; and they are seldom eaten and still seldomer digested by birds or animals, owing to their tough and slippery surfaces. We have here, then, the very same inducements of food, sweetness, perfume, and color expended by the plant upon its fruit for the sake of its seeds that we saw before expended upon the flower for the sake of obtaining cross-fertilization by the aid of insects.

At the same time, it is interesting to note that almost all the gourd family possess in some part or other of their economy certain bitter, nauseating, medicinal principles, expressly intended to deter animals from meddling with or eating them. But these bitter principles are variously distributed in the leaves, stems, stock, or fruit, according to the special type of dangers to which the par

ticular plant is specially exposed. The red berries of our English bryony are eaten by birds, who aid, of course, in disseminating the seeds; but the big and swollen root, known to French herbalists as the navet du diable, in which the plant stores all its accumulated material for next year's growth, is strenuously protected from the attacks of rabbits, pigs, and other grubbing animals by an intensely bitter and poisonous principle which chemists call bryonine. Colocynth, again-the amorous colocynth -is a plant closely allied to the melon and cucumber; but in this case the intensely bitter and poisonous essence (the "uncompounded pills" of the poet) is diffused in the fruit itself, which, like that of the squirting cucumber, desires to repel rather than to entice the attentions of animals. In the edible cucumber, once more, which prefers to be eaten, the bitter principle is collected at the stalk-end of the unripe fruit, as well as generally in the outer rind, thus serving to prevent attacks in the early stages of growth, or unauthorized grubbing into the soft pulp by useless insects. I suppose I need hardly remind even the non-agricultural mind in these days of villa-gardening that the ripe cucumber is bright yellow, smooth, and faintly sweetish; on our tables it always appears in its unripe stage, when it is green, hard, and covered externally with rough excrescences, intended to repel the attacks of enemies. In the early gherkin state it is even prickly.

The fruit of the actual bottle-gourd itself is intermediate in size between the great tropical calabash and the little bryonyberries of our northern hedge-rows. Its one noteworthy peculiarity lies in its hard, coriaceous, and shining rind, far more woody in character than even that of its near allies the pumpkins and the calabashes. This peculiarity, again, is not without a meaning in the history of the race: it points back with no uncertain finger (why should gourds be denied fingers ?) to the subtropical origin of the gourd species. For the bottle-gourd itself, to employ the language most frequently applied to our Aryan brother, is a native of India, though it has long been cultivated for the sake of its fruits round the whole Mediterranean. Now, it is a noticeable fact in the philosophy of fruits that most fruits of northern climates, like the strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, and currant, can be picked off the bush, tree, or vine, and popped at once into the mouth without any preparation; but almost all tropical fruits, like the orange, pineapple, mango, and banana, require a plate with a knife and fork to eat them with; in other words, they can only be eaten after we have stripped off a hard or nauseous rind.

Why this difference? Well, it has reference clearly to the kind of animals by which the seeds of each are oftenest disseminated in the native condition. Northern fruits, in short, are mainly eaten by small birds, which swallow them whole, but

never digest the hard, knobby seeds, so conspicuous in the blackberry, the currant, and the grape. Southern fruits, on the contrary, are mainly eaten by parrots, monkeys, and other large fruitfeeders, for whose attraction the plants specially lay themselves out. Hence the southern types desire to keep off unauthorized small intruders, which would merely pick holes in their pulp without doing any real good to the plant, as wasps do with our northern peaches. For this purpose, natural selection has favored in their case the development of various abstruse devices for keeping off the smaller birds and animals. Sometimes, as with the orange, lemon, and citron, the outer rind is bitter and nasty; sometimes, as with the cashew, it is violently pungent, acrid, and irritating; sometimes, as with the pomegranate, it is merely hard, stiff, and leathery. But, in all instances alike, it is meant to repel by every means in the plant's power the small intruder. Monkeys and parrots, however, the friends of the species, do not mind these slight outer defenses; they strip them off easily with hand or beak, and reach the sweet pulp within, duly intended by the grateful tree for their edification. On the other hand, the actual seed itself in tropical fruits is always thoroughly well protected against their teeth or bills, either by a very hard stone, as in the olive, date, and mango, or by intense bitterness, as in the orange and lemon.

It is to this specially defended tropical type of fruits that the true bottle-gourd essentially belongs. Our little English bryony has a mere northern bird-berry, round, and red, and soft, and almost rindless; it has adapted itself in this matter to the small ways of robins and finches. But the gourd has a hard and forbidding rind; it fastens itself up in a firm covering; it lays itself out with all its soul for the larger fruit-eaters of tropical forests. Not, indeed, that in its raw ripe state the gourd is by any means so dry and hard as in the arid form which we see in southern wine-shops. The method of preparing gourds for use as bottles is, indeed, a sufficiently lengthy one. You pick your fruit and hang it up to dry, not in the sun, but under the shade of the roof, for a whole year before it is fit for boring. As soon as it has hardened evenly all over, you cut a round hole at the stalk-end (at least in the common double-bulging form employed as a flask by southern shepherds) and rattle out the dry seeds and pulp, which easily come out of themselves through the opening. The remaining husk is hard enough and thick enough to bear carving. I have several gourds in my little collection thus carved in deep relief with Moorish patterns, including one which bears on its face, four times repeated, a text from the Koran.

Gourds, calabashes, and the shells of cocoanuts, together with human skulls and the horns of cattle, sheep, and antelopes, seem

to have formed the earliest natural objects employed as vessels by primitive humanity. But of all these the gourd, by its singular variety of shape, best lent itself to the greatest and most varied uses. Besides the common double-bulging form, constricted in the middle, with the little bulb above and the big one below, so frequent as a water-bottle, you can get gourds in an immense number of other types, globular, compressed, bowl-like, or flaskshaped. A Corsican model, which lies before me this moment as I write, has a flattened circular form from back to front, the back being the side next the stalk, and the front the side where the corolla has fallen off, leaving a little umbilicus or knob to mark its place in the very center. This form is ingeniously turned by the Corsicans into a very neat sort of flask or bottle for the girdle by cutting holes in the narrow side and fastening two handles for suspension at a graceful point half-way between the mouth and the middle line of the circle. The pretty vessel thus obtained is the model on which thousands of exquisite vases have long been turned out in ancient Etruria and at modern Vallauris.

The commonest shape of all, however, is the Syrian gourd with a round bulb, ending toward the stalk in a long neck, and capable, when filled with wine or water, of standing securely on its own basis by means of the slight depression at the umbilicus. This is, indeed, the original parent from which almost all bottles, carafes, and decanters, all the world over, have ultimately descended. The terra-cotta forms used as water-bottles, with a round bulb and long neck, most closely resemble their original to the present day, as the Japanese vases of two or three bulbs, successively constricted and growing larger from top to bottom, most closely resemble the double-bulging variety.

The reason why gourds are so manifold in shape is twofold. It is partly because they are a naturally plastic species, constantly giving rise to various divergent forms, like their neighbors the cucumbers; which divergent forms have, of course, been seized upon and still further developed for his own use by gourd-using man. But it is partly, also, because gourds, while growing, can be made to assume almost any desired shape or curve by tying string or wire round their rind. Primitive man early discovered this simple method of manufacture. I have seen gourds which in this manner have been twisted into the semblance of powderhorns or wallets, and others which have been induced to ring themselves round half a dozen times over till they look almost like beads on a necklace.

Early man, no doubt, used his gourd as a gourd alone. But as time went on he began at last, apparently, to employ it as a model for pottery also. In all probability his earliest lessons in the fictile art were purely accidental. It is a common trick with savages to