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majority of bunches showing more or less of it. He must be an 

 unobservant buyer who has not rejected scabby bananas, and an 

 uncommonly honest or clumsy dealer who has failed to slip in a few 

 such along with their better fellows. 



The reader will easily recall bananas that under an unpromisingly 

 dry and scabby skin yielded a hard, brown, and, it may be, somewhat 

 astringent pulp. That was the occasion on which the banana scab, 

 having been bundled along from planter to shipper, and from shipper 

 to wholesaler, and from wholesaler to retailer, at last found itself, 

 along with the rest of the sins and shortcomings of the world, loaded 

 on to the back of the consumer. This long-suffering individual 

 is so used to repeating all day long, " Oh, well, it is a small 

 matter, let it go," that we hear no more about it. It is, however, the 

 province of the specialist to sum up these small individual losses, see 

 what they amount to, and, if they are of sufficient consequence, to 

 trace them to their source, in order to ascertain whether any remedy 

 is to be had. 



There will be little difficulty in convincing all who enjoy a good 

 banana that the aggregate of inferiority arising through the presence 

 of one or more scabby bananas in every few dozen sold must amount 

 to something very considerable quite enough to justify some small 

 effort to find a remedy. At the same time, one feels the effort should 

 be proportionate to the importance of the subject, which certainly, in 

 this State, cannot claim to be very great. 



At the present time more scab is coming to our shores from the 

 neighbouring state of Queensland than from any other source. Not 

 that this is discreditable to Queensland. The explanation is suggested 

 by the well-known pseudo-conundrum, " Why do white sheep eat 

 more than black sheep ?" and its answer, " Because there are so many 

 more of them." The Queensland banana plantations may yield more 

 scab than those of our Northern Rivers for the &ame excellent reason. 



Fig. 47. A. banana, showing the initial stage of scab. The disease has made a beginning opposite 

 a, where the skin is seen to be opening in small cracks. A stage later is shown in Fig. 48. 



We will begin then by describing Banana Scab as it occurs on 

 bananas imported into Sydney from the northern ports of Queensland. 



The specimens from which the description is prepared came from 

 Cairns, Queensland, and consisted of nearly full-grown bananas, the 



