previous next

CHAP. 7. (3.)—THE GOURD: SEVENTEEN REMEDIES. THE SOMPHUS: ONE REMEDY.

There is found also a wild gourd, called "somphos" by the Greeks, empty within (to which circumstance it owes its name),1 and long and thick in shape, like the finger: it grows nowhere except upon stony spots. The juice of this gourd, when chewed, is very beneficial to the stomach.2

1 From the Greek σομφὸς, porous, spongy, or hollow.

2 It is supposed by some naturalists that this gourd is the variety Pyxidaris of the Cucurbita pepo of Linnæus, the Colocynthis amara of C. Bauhin. Fée remarks, however, that this designation is arbitrary; as this plant never grows wild in Europe, and its pulp is so bitter, that instead of proving beneficial to the stomach, it would cause vomiting. From the fact of its comparison to the human finger, he doubts if it really was one of the Cucurbitæ at all.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Latin (Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff, 1906)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: