Abstract
ACCORDING to Dr. Orland E. White of the University of Virginia, Africa, not America, is the native land of the water-melon. Speaking before the meeting of the Virginia Academy of Science, he told of recent researches at the Blandy Experimental Farm, which throw new light on the ancestry of this plant. Water-melons were not known at either the Epicurean feasts of ancient Greece or the Lucullan banquets of Rome. Not until the great age of exploration in the sixteenth century do they appear in the world picture. Dr. White is of the opinion that the Portuguese, pushing southward along the coast of Africa, became acquainted with the ancestors of modern water-melons growing wild in South Africa. They soon transferred them to their colony of Brazil, where the Indians promptly adopted them and added them to their own array of crops. Thus the myth of an American origin of water-melons came into being.
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