WHERE BANANAS GROW. 487 



largely determines the character of our food. We owe our good 

 fortune to the abundance and cheapness of the fruit brought to 

 our gates even more than to our growing appreciation of the 

 hygienic value of good fruit. Our neighbors of northern Europe 

 are relatively so far removed from fruit-growing regions that 

 their winter supply of fresh fruit seems likely to remain limited 

 and costly, however great their willingness to buy. 



The stores of fruit which have been instrumental in this 

 happy development of a nation of fruit-eaters in the last genera- 

 tion have come, as has been said, chiefly from our own territory. 

 But the banana, which has played as great a part as any one sort, 

 is strictly tropical, sensitive to very moderate cold, and growing 

 safely in our own country only in extreme southern Florida. 

 But here is little good banana land, and the prospective grower 

 of this fruit must look beyond, to the South, for the scene of his 

 operations. 



The banana is probably a native of southern Asia and the 

 Malay Archipelago, but has been known and esteemed from very 

 early times in tropical America. It is now extensively cultivated 

 in the West Indies and Central America both for home consump- 

 tion and for export. One may form some idea of the growth of 

 our appreciation of bananas from the statement of one familiar 

 with the trade for the past twenty-five years, that an importation 

 of twenty-five hundred bunches into Boston in a summer week, 

 twenty years ago, could with the greatest difficulty be disposed 

 of. Yet the usual receipts for a corresponding period at present 

 are over fifty thousand bunches, and double that number have 

 found a market in a single week. We may try to realize some- 

 thing of the quantity of bananas we eat from the careful trade 

 estimate of importations into the United States in 1892, which is 

 as follows : 



Into New Orleans 4,483,351 bunches. 



Into New York 3,715,625 



Into Philadelphia 1,818,328 



Into Boston 1,710,005 



Into Baltimore 625,077 



Into minor Southern ports 343,000 



The total of 12,695,380 bunches represents an increase of 1,578,032 

 bunches over the previous year. It is true that when we talk of 

 millions of bunches, which means hundreds of millions of ba- 

 nanas, the mind quite fails to grasp the hugeness of the fact. So 

 we may add that this quantity represents about twenty bananas 

 to each person in the whole United States, and a value of not less 

 than five million dollars at the points of shipment before they are 

 placed on board. Formerly our Northern ports received a large 

 part of their supply from Central America and the Isthmus ; but 



