DIVI BOTANICI. 41 



preserved in that most ancient botanical scripture which elevates 

 him as the Father of Phytography to the applause and veneration 

 of all posterity. His descriptions certainly, though sketchily, repre- 

 sent the first defined* and the most valued of the musaceous family ; 

 and they were adopted with an enduring faithfulness and happily 

 enlarged by the pencil of Pliny, whose philosophical concupiscence 

 was exquisite and insatiable. 



Dr. Holland's version of Pliny, Tome ii, p. 361, leads him to say, 

 '-' a tree there is in India bearing a very fair, big, and sweet fruit, 

 and thereof the sages and philosophers do ordinarily liue. The leafe 

 resembleth birds' wings, carrying three cubits in length and two in 

 bredth. The fruit it pvts forth at the bark, hauing within it a 

 wonderfull pleasant iuice ; insomuch as one of them is sufficient to 

 giue four men a competent and full refection. The tree's name is 

 Pala" (still Palan in the Malabarian dialect) "and the fruit thereof 

 is called ariena. Great plenty of them is in the country of the Sy- 

 draci, the utmost limit of Alexander the Great his expedition and 

 voiages. There is another tree like to this, and it beareth a fruit 

 more delectable than this arena, howbeit the bowels in a man's belly it 

 wringeth and breeds the bloodie flux," being taken to excess and with- 

 out judgment. " As for the Macedonian souldiers, they talked much 

 of many other trees, but in general tearmes only, and to the most 

 they gaue no names at all." Similar effects still continue to be ex- 

 perienced by Europeans, when they indulge overfreely in using the 

 pleasant fruitage that tempts them to intemperance, on their first 

 visiting the climates where it is indigenous. 



Next came the Arabian doctors, expatiating on the properties of 

 the Plantain-tree and the Banana, with little regard to discrimination. 

 Inditing his experience, Avicennat affirms that their fruit yields 



• Theophrastus leaves them altogether without names: he says, "In In- 

 dia, there is a fine large tree remarkable for the size and delicacv of its 

 fruit ; the native ascetics, who live naked, use it for their sustenance": there 

 is another with leaves as long as the Ostrich-feathers worn on military hel- 

 mets : and there is a third, having long inflected fruit which is delightful to 



the taste, but occasions flatulence and disorder of the bowels." Theophrasti 



Errsii Ilisloriu Plantarum, Grien- el Lntini; euro Johannis Borttei a Sfapel ; 

 folio, Amslelodami, lCf4 ; p. 347. 



t Abu Ali al Hossain Ebn Abdallah Elm Sina, corrupted by the latinists 

 to Avicenna, ranks as the highest authority with the Turkish, Arabian, and 

 Persian physicians. He describes the Musa in the second book of his Canon 

 Medicinte, as translated into Latin from the original Arabic, by Gerard of 

 Cremona; folio, Papiae, 1483. This Canon is a sort of medical encyclopedia, 

 VOL Vltl., NO. XXIII. 7 



