n8 HOUSE, GARDEN, AND FIELD 



A ripe banana contains much sugar ; you know its 

 sweet taste. An unripe banana contains little sugar but 

 much starch. The unripe fruits are sun-dried and ground 

 to meal, which in some tropical countries forms the chief 

 food of the people. The meal is scalded and eaten as 

 porridge, or made into cakes and baked. Bananas are 

 probably native to the Malay Archipelago, but have long 

 been grown in India, Africa, America, and the West 

 Indies. They are very productive, and are said to yield 

 forty times as much food for a given acreage as a crop of 

 potatoes ; no other tropical fruit is so important as an 

 article of food. Vast quantities of the fruit are exported 

 from the West Indies to the United States ; bananas sold 

 in our shops come chiefly from the Canary Islands and 

 the British West Indies (1902). The leaf-stalk yields a 

 valuable fibre, and the fibre of one variety of banana 

 forms the celebrated Manila hemp. 



I have before me a photograph of a clump of bananas 

 growing in Ceylon. 1 A single leaf -blade is as tall as a man, 

 and since the leaf -stalk is considerably longer than the 

 blade, a banana rises high above the ground, and looks 

 like a fair-sized tree. Its trunk is not however of solid 

 wood, but merely consists of a number of leaf -stalks 

 wrapped one round another. The great leaf-blade has a 

 strong midrib, from which side- veins pass outwards to 

 the margin ; it looks, especially when fretted by the wind, 

 like an enormous goose-quill. Banana-plants grow very 

 fast, as well they may, considering that they are nearly 

 all leaves ; the ascending shoot of a plant thirty feet high 

 only rises a few inches above the ground. No wonder that 

 they have been compared to gigantic leeks. A banana 

 will grow and ripen its fruit in twelve months. 



The family (Scitamineae) to which the banana belongs 

 3'ields also arrowroot and ginger ; it is therefore a family 

 of great importance to mankind. 



1 Plate in Schimper's Geography of Plants. 



