2. The African forms. Naudin had no specimens in sufficiently good condition, or of which the wild state was sufficiently certain to assert positively the habitation of the species in Africa. He admits it with hesitation. He includes in the species cultivated forms, or other wild ones, of which he had not seen the fruit. Sir Joseph Hooker[1276] subsequently obtained specimens which prove more. I am not speaking of those from the Nile Valley,[1277] which are probably cultivated, but of plants gathered by Barter in Guinea in the sands on the banks of the Niger. Thonning[1278] had previously found, in sandy soil in Guinea, a _Cucumis_ to which he had given the name _arenarius_; and Cogniaux,[1279] after having seen a specimen brought home by this traveller, had classed it with _C. Melo_, as Sir J. Hooker thought. The negroes eat the fruit of the plant found by Barter. The smell is that of a fresh green melon. In Thonning’s plant the fruit is ovoid, the size of a plum. Thus in Africa as in India the species bears small fruit in a wild state, as we might expect. The _Dudaim_ among cultivated varieties is allied to it. The majority of the species of the genus _Cucumis_ are found in Africa; a small minority in Asia or in America. Other species of _Cucurbitaceæ_ are divided between Asia and America, although as a rule, in this family, the areas of species are continuous and restricted. _Cucumis Melo_ was once perhaps, like _Citrullus Colocynthis_ of the same family, wild from the west coast of Africa as far as India without any break. I formerly hesitated to admit that the melon was indigenous in the north of the Caucasus, as it is asserted by ancient authors—an assertion which has not been confirmed by subsequent botanists. Hohenacker, who was said to have found the species near Elisabethpolis, makes no mention of it in his paper upon the province of Talysch. M. Boissier does not include _Cucumis Melo_ in his Oriental flora. He merely says that it is easily naturalized on rubbish-heaps and waste ground. The same thing has been observed elsewhere, for instance in the sands of Ussuri, in Eastern Asia. This would be a reason for mistrusting the locality of the sands of the Niger, if the small size of the fruit in this case did not recall the wild forms of India. The culture of the melon, or of different varieties of the melon, may have begun separately in India and Africa. Its introduction into China appears to date only from the eighth century of our era, judging from the epoch of the first work which mentions it.[1280] As the relations of the Chinese with Bactriana, and the north-west of India by the embassy of Chang-kien, date from the second century, it is possible that the culture of the species was not then widely diffused in Asia. The small size of the wild fruit offered little inducement. No Sanskrit name is known, but there is a Tamul name, probably less ancient, _molam_,[1281] which is like the Latin _Melo_.