The papaw is a large herbaceous plant rather than a tree. It has a sort of juicy trunk terminated by a tuft of leaves, and the fruit, which is like a melon, hangs down under the leaves.[1464] It is now grown in all tropical countries, even as far as thirty to thirty-two degrees of latitude. It is easily naturalized outside plantations. This is one reason why it has been said, and people still say that it is a native of Asia or of Africa, whereas Robert Brown and I proved in 1848 and 1855 its American origin.[1465] I repeat the arguments against its supposed origin in the eastern hemisphere. The species has no Sanskrit name. In modern Indian languages it bears names derived from the American word _papaya_, itself a corruption of the Carib _ababai_.[1466] Rumphius[1467] says that the inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago considered it as an exotic plant introduced by the Portuguese, and gave it names expressing its likeness to other species or its foreign extraction. Sloane,[1468] in the beginning of the eighteenth century, quotes several of his contemporaries, who mention that it was taken from the West Indies into Asia and Africa. Forster had not seen it in the plantations of the Pacific Isles at the time of Cook’s voyages. Loureiro,[1469] in the middle of the eighteenth century, had seen it in cultivation in China, Cochin-China, and Zanzibar. So useful and so striking a plant would have been spread throughout the old world for thousands of years if it had existed there. Everything leads to the belief that it was introduced on the coasts of Africa and Asia after the discovery of America. All the species of the family are American. This one seems to have been cultivated from Brazil to the West Indies, and in Mexico before the arrival of the Europeans, since the earliest writers on the productions of the new world mention it.[1470]