GUINEA SQUASH, or AUBERGINE (Solanum melongena), a plant of the family Solauaccz. Its original home is sup posed to be the East Indies, where it has long been cultivated and from whence it has been introduced into all tropical countries and many temperate ones for the sake of its egg-like white, yellow or purple fruits, which are used as a vegetable. In the United States it is cultivated as far north as Long Island and southern Mich igan. In the North the plants must be started under glass and transplanted to the field or garden after danger of frost has passed. They do best upon rich deep loams well exposed to the sun. Their principal insect enemies are practically the same as those of the potato and arecombated similarly. (See Their fungus diseases are few and rarely dev astating. The principal ones are a bacterial disease caused by Bacillus solanacearum, for which there seems to be no satisfactory remedy; anthracnose (Gleosporium which appears as pink-spotted sunken areas upon the fruits; leaf-spot (Phyllosticta hortorum), which turns the affected leaves brown and pro duces holes in them, and a mold (Botrytis fasci cularis), which produces soft spots with gray moldy surfaces upon the fruits. Each of these
parasites may appear upon any of the green parts, but the parts mentioned are the usual ones. They may all be controlled by timely applications of any standard fungicide.
the hard calcareous pro tuberance at the tip of the beak or snout of a chick or young reptile which is born within an egg having a tough shell, designed to assist the embryo in escaping. It wears a hole through the lining membrane of the egg, and then acts as a file to bore through the outer shell or wedge apart any crack. It is possessed by all birds and by such reptiles (turtles, lizards and snakes) as develop in eggs with hard coverings. Soon after the embryo goes free this excrescence falls off, and in this special temporary provision for a special non-recurring exigency, Darwin found an example, in his view, of the results of natural selection.
or any of the typical globose sea-urchins, especially those of the genus Echinus. Similarly, the flat, bun shaped echinoderms are called acake-urchins' the cockle-shaped (spatangoids) "heart-urchins," and so on. See ECHINODERMATA ; SEA-URCHIN.