It's Called a Russell Seedless," the title of an interview with the late botanist, Russell Thorndike, published in _Smithsonian_ in 1996. In one of the few reports on seedless watermelons to have appeared in a professional journal, a plant breeder named George Rigg (1872–1965), who worked for John C. Russell & Son Company, wrote an article called "Why So Few Seeds in Most Cucurbita," which appeared in _The_ _Quarterly Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society_ in 1901. His answer was that the seedless melons—all of which were seedless—should be bred to increase their seed production. He called for an end to "the present futile waste of seed" by breeding a seed-producing variety from a seedless one. No one had yet produced a seed-producing heirloom variety from the Bermuda stock, and the old varieties were becoming rarer and harder to find. Rigg was frustrated: There is, it is true, a great deal of waste in this direction; but at present a comparatively small number of seedlings produce large numbers of marketable produce—in other words, this waste is compensated by what is an enormous produce of the market. Without the waste, however, much of the profit to be derived from growing would cease to exist. Rigg went on to propose that any of these seedless heirloom varieties should be crossed with a small-seeded variety to increase the number of seeds. The seeds could then be saved and sold. He also advised that seeds from seedless varieties should never be sown unless for the purpose of being grown as ornamentals. He did not feel that seedless melons could be farmed profitably for seed. In fact, he considered it questionable whether these varieties were worth preserving: In conclusion, I am quite convinced that the present interest of the horticultural public is not due to the existence of these orchid-like varieties, and that they have little attraction to seedsmen, nurserymen, and seed growers, and do not promise for the future anything of a financial nature. Rigg did not live to see seedless melons resurrected. He died in 1965, shortly after his paper was published. Seedless watermelons were already a casualty of horticultural economics. A seedless melon does not come with an inheritance. Without seeds, it is impossible to reproduce its variety, though an offspring may have similar size and shape. The reason that seedless melons did not survive was purely economic—they were unprofitable to grow, in terms of their seeds, so farmers did not bother to plant them. As long as it took people to accept the fact that watermelon seeds were bad luck and their presence in a crop was a sign of doom, farmers and market gardeners would leave melons with the seeds on the plants. An elderly Japanese gardener at the Mitsuwa market in New York explained why watermelon seeds are traditionally found on farm crops in Japan: "We eat the seeds because in ancient times watermelons were food, and we eat everything that was food." Some people feel that seeds are inauspicious, and they consider removing them unnecessary or even sacrilegious. In this view, eating seeds is not good for the body. When the Chinese eat the melon seeds in the classic soup, hot and sour soup, they remove the tiny nutlike seeds, called bao shen, because these are considered particularly harmful. As a joke, though, I once showed these seeds to a man who was the head of the kitchen staff at a famous New York restaurant, one that used those seeds for its soup. He knew what they were but was very surprised to see them for the first time. He had never seen them used in that way, or even grown them himself. Although he liked the soup with the seeds, he was puzzled by the ritual of their removal. As I have said, it is commonly supposed that seeds are poisonous, and they were a favorite for poison plots in some fairy tales, but this is not correct. Sattwic seeds are an important part of the diet. Because they come from the earth, people have used them to ground themselves. They were a way to purify and detoxify. Ancient people understood this, as is shown by an interpretation of a Sanskrit poem that begins: The earth is my witness. The earth is my witness. I will speak the truth. Earth, earth is my witness. It is good. There is truth. The earth is my witness.... Let the witness be known. The seed is also the plant.... All this will be known in the day of the fire. _Darshana_ is fire. All this was sown. It sprouted. Sattwic seeds make us strong, purifying our system, while tamasic seeds are poisonous and make us weak. If we remove seedlike seeds from a melon and eat them, we eat the poisonous seeds, for they are hidden inside. The only seeds that are harmless to eat are those that we produce ourselves. Sattwic seeds include not only vegetable seeds but all of nature. The seeds in a gourd are the fruit of the plant, which have been fertilized and nurtured by the sattwic energies. Seeds and plants are interchangeable, as they are in nature, as the fruit of one plant is the fruit of another plant. Thus the seed inside the watermelon is as much a fruit as the rind—both are fruits of the plant. In the beginning, before the fruit ripens, a gourd contains only the embryo. Nature provides the conditions and forces of water and earth for the fruit to form and ripen. We have access to them as well, and we can benefit from them and use them as part of the medicine in the gourd. We can draw this out even more. The seeds in a watermelon have a lot of water in them. In the fruit, the fluid is concentrated because the seeds are trapped inside. One way to describe it is that the watermelon's energy is concentrated. This does not mean, though, that seeds must be used in only concentrated form, such as in capsules, such as with the concentrated powder used to make the powder from which all the medicine in the book _Healing with Coconut Oil_ is made. We need not restrict ourselves, even when we are discussing medicines. Our life force is all around us. In our minds we may only consider it concentrated or dilute, but it is always around us. We can open to it in any form and use it as medicine. The concentrated gourd, with its medicine inside, is like a temple, and the seeds are like the medicine. A seedling begins to grow because of the sattwic energies of life, and then it develops and ripens with the sattwic forces. The seed is a part of a plant. The plant, once formed, continues to grow and develop with the help of the sattwic energies, which it takes from the earth. The fruit is an extension of the tree. In India, plants and trees often bear fruit in the same places on a tree or near the base of a branch or trunk. It is the same fruit, but it develops differently because of the different sattwic energies surrounding it. All these forces come from the sun and the moon. The same forces are present in the fruit, but when the fruit ripens, it is no longer under the influence of those forces. It is still edible, for the sattwic and tamasic forces are all the same in the body and the energy of the body, but these forces are now different. The fruit continues to exist and is eaten as food. Because they are nourishing, sattwic seeds also can be added to a meal to supplement it. When they are combined with the meat of a dead animal or an animal that died of natural causes, the forces are changed into tamasic. The food comes from animals, and there is a certain level of violence in killing an animal to eat it. Meat from the store is usually obtained through killing, and meat can be obtained only by killing. Only after the death of the animal, which comes only when the time is ripe, do the seeds appear. When an animal is slaughtered, blood and meat are removed, but the seed cannot be removed. If a plant cannot send its roots into the ground, it will die. If it cannot send its fruits down to the earth, it will die. This is why watermelons need to be planted near the ground. The way in which the plant parts grow and ripen to reach the ground, by following a downward trajectory from the plant, is called _anuvrat_ in Sanskrit. There are many references in the Vedas to the need to bring certain fruits to the earth by following the downward trajectory of _anuvrat_. In that way, they will ripen and their medicine can enter them. The seedless watermelon is in most of the Vedas, even though it is not a commonly found fruit. Most of the Vedic scriptures show a watermelon in the center of a great mandala of sattwic fruits, which are all round and yellow. The seedless melon is considered very desirable because it grows quickly and produces large quantities of food. Even though it ripens quickly, it can also be cared for longer. The seedless melon needs to be planted close to the ground so that it will have time