Excerpt from Transactions of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, for the Year 1877, Vol. 1 Different varieties of squashes and pumpkins seem to come from different countries, yet, with a few exceptions of recent introduction, we know very little about their origin. Prof. Asa Gray, says The pumpkin was cultivated by the North American Indians, be fore the coming of the whites. He also says: The orange and egg gourd grows wild in Texas, and is probably the original of all this group. It seems to me that the pumpkin might have originated from the gourd, and the squash from the pumpkin. The fact that the gourd is more vigorous and productive than the pumpkin, and that the pumpkin is more vigorous than the squash, seems to indicate this order of improvement. It is a well established fact that the farther from the original an animal or plant is carried by domestication and improvement, the less vigor it has, and certainly our best squashes have less constitution and vigor than the pumpkin, and' the pump kin less than the wild gourd. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.