272 A PROVISION GROUND. 



did the ancestors of tluit plant come ? What was its wild 

 stock like ages ago ? It is wild nowhere now on earth. It 

 stands alone and iinic|ue in the vegetable kingdom, witli 

 distant cousins, but no brother kinds. It has been cul- 

 tivated so long that though it flowers and fruits, it seldom 

 or never seeds, and is propagated entirely by cuttings. 

 The only spot, as far as I am aware, in which it seeds 

 regularly and plentifully, is the remote, and till of late 

 barbarous Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.^ 



There it regularly springs up in the second growth, after 

 the forest is cleared, and bears fruits full of seed as close 

 together as they can be pressed. ' How did the plant get 

 there ? Was it once cultivated- there by a race superior to 

 tlie now utterly savage islanders, and at an epoch so remote 

 that it had not yet lost the power of seeding ? Are the 

 Andamans its oricjinal home ? or rather, was its orimnal 

 home that great southern continent of which the Andamans 

 are perhaps a remnant ? Does not this fact, as well as the 

 broader fact that different varieties of the Plantain and 

 Banana girdle the earth round at the Tropics, and have 

 girdled it as long as records go back, hint at a time when 

 there was a tropic continent or archipelago round the whole 

 equator, and at a civilization and a horticulture to which 



1 I owe these curious facts, and specimens of the seeds, to the courtesy of 

 Dr. King, of the Bengal army. The seeds are now in the hands of Dr. Hooker, 

 at Kew. 



