THE STORAGE OF FOOD-RESERVES 149 
dates, pineapples, mulberries, melons, cucumbers, and 
marrows. 
The Banana (Musa Sapientum) is one of the most prolific 
of food-plants. A single cluster may contain as many as 
160 to 180 fruits and weigh 80 pounds. It is propagated 
by suckers arising from the base of the stem, and a new 
sprout will begin to bear fruit in three months. The 
tree grows in the wet forest-regions of the Tropics, and 
supplies food all the year round. With its leaves the 
savage thatches his hut, and when he moves his home- 
stead, burns out a new clearing, plants his suckers, and 
waits for Nature to do the rest. The food per acre 
obtained from the chief food-products cultivated by 
man is: 
Pounds per Acre. 
Sago-palm .. ae ‘> ie 25. $292-320 
Banana 3 AC ete sia set 2A? 000 
Potato Bi: af cre - a 4,000 
Wheat =P BE na oe ae 2,000 
Many fruits provide food for birds, but not for man. 
They are either insipid, nauseous, noxious, or poisonous— 
e.g., the hips of roses (sometimes made into jam), haws 
of hawthorn, berries of the black and white bryony, 
nightshade, mistletoe, privet, elder, mountain-ash, straw- 
berry-tree, arum, etc. 
By cultivation man has considerably improved many 
of his fleshy fruits, the succulent and juicy tissues being 
developed at the expense of the harder parts intended by 
Nature for the protection of the seeds. Most of the more 
specialized fruits are propagated vegetatively by cuttings, 
grafts, suckers, etc., in order that the qualities .of the 
parent may be preserved in the fruit. So long and so 
extensively has this been practised, that in some cases the 
efficiency of the seeds has been diminished to such an 
extent that they have become sterile. Apples, pears, and 
plums are seldom raised from seed, the existing varieties 
being chiefly the outcome of careful selection during many 
generations without the intervention of seed. Other food- 
plants have suffered in the same way. The “seed” pota- 
toes of the gardener are not seeds, but specially selected 
tubers ; it is only with difficulty that potatoes can be 
raised from seed at all. In the banana the seeds are quite 
useless, while the seed of the sugar-cane is almost unknown. 
