Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/329

Rh 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 fruit eating 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.