Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/325

Rh either to barbarous or civilized people. For even that familiar brown glass receptacle out of which we pour Bass's beer at our modern dinner-tables, derives its shape ultimately from the Mediterranean gourd; and every other form of bottle in the known world is equally based, in the last resort, upon some member or other of the gourd family.

I don't believe, indeed, the importance of gourds, as a class, in the history of civilization has ever yet been properly recognized by the annalists of culture. On them, it would seem, with their close congeners the tropical calabashes, the entire art and mystery of pottery ultimately depend. It is possible to trace back almost every vase or other fictile vessel manufactured to-day at Burslem or at Vallauris to this most primitive and simple of all possible water-jars. It behooves us, therefore, in an epoch of pothunters, to know something of the nature of this earliest pot, as a moment in the evolution of our existing civilization. A plant on which so ancient and universal an art at last bases itself may well claim some twenty minutes of our scanty leisure in this æsthetic, refined, and pottery-worshiping century.

The gourd, then, to begin at the beginning, is of course a cucumber by family, belonging to the same great group of rapidly growing and large-leaved climbers as the melon, the pumpkin, and the vegetable marrow. All these plants are mere annuals, and they are remarkable among their class for the stature they attain in a single year, for the size of their leaves, and for the bigness of the fruit, in comparison with the short time it takes in growing. Only the sunflower and Indian corn can equal them at all in this last respect. Vegetative energy is the strong point of the gourds. They have a power of growth and a vigor of constitution nowhere surpassed among yearling plants. It was not without reason in the nature of things that the creeper which grew up in a night and overshadowed Jonah should have been figured by the Hebrew allegory as a gourd. No other plant grows so fast, or produces in so short a space of time so luxuriant a canopy of shady foliage.

The true gourds, in fact, have adapted themselves entirely to the climbing habit. This is in itself a half-parasitic mode of existence to which many plants have taken as a bid for life, because it saves them all the trouble and expense of producing a stout and woody stem for their own support. The way the gourds climb is by means of spiral, curled tendrils, which are in reality small abortive stipules or leaf-appendages, specialized for the work of clinging to the external object, be it bough or stem of some other plant, over which the beautiful parasite rapidly spreads itself. The tendrils push themselves out on every side, revolving as they go, till they reach some slender twig or leaf-stalk to which they