Ch. V.] BAXAXA XOT IXDIGEXOTJS. 67 



vegetable, and resembles vegetable marrow. At Santo 

 Domingo, it continues to bear a succession of fruits 

 during eight months of the year. 



Next to maize, plantains and bananas form the prin- \ 

 cipal sustenance of the natives. The banana tree shoots 

 up its succulent stem, and unfolds its immense entire 

 leaves with great rapidity ; and a group of them waving 

 their silky leaves in the sun, or shining ghostly white in 

 the moonlight, forms one of those beautiful sights that 

 can only be seen to perfection in the tropics. There are 

 a great many varieties of them, and they are cooked in 

 many ways boiled, baked, made into pastry, or eaten as 

 a fruit. The varieties differ not only in their fruits, but 

 in the colour of their leaves and stems ; the natives can 

 distinguish them without seeing the fruit, and have names 

 for each, by which they are known throughout all Cen- 

 tral America, Mexico, and Peru. These names are of 

 Spanish origin ; and this fact, together with the absence 

 of any native, Mexican, or Peruvian name for the fruit, 

 incline me to adopt the opinion of Clavigero, who con- 

 tends, in opposition to other writers, that the plantain 

 and banana were not known in these countries before the 

 Spanish conquest, but were first brought from the Cana- 

 ries to Hayti in 1516, and from thence taken to the 

 mainland. 



Neither the sugar-cane * nor the plantain is given in 

 the list of the indigenous productions of Mexico by the 

 careful and accurate Hernandez. The natives made 

 sugar from the green stems of the maize. Humboldt 



* The sugar-cane is said never to bear seed in the West Indies, 

 Malaga, India, Cochin China, or the Malay Archipelago. Darwin's 

 " Animals and Plants under Domestication," vol. ii. p. 169. 



F 2 



