CHAPTER VII 



FRUITS AND VEGETABLES 



Fruits. The tropical zone furnishes a very large number 

 of wild fruits to which the late Dr Trimen's judgment that 

 they are edible but not worth eating may in general be 

 applied. At the same time they are by no means usually so 

 inedible as the wild fruits of the north, from which the plum, 

 the apple, the gooseberry, etc. have been produced, and there 

 is consequently reason to hope that in the future we may get 

 some very fine fruits from the tropics, when selection has been 

 properly applied. What has been done in the past with the 

 mango, the pineapple, the plantain, gives good ground for hope 

 in this respect, the more now that we are beginning, thanks to 

 the work of Mendel, Bateson, and others, to understand the 

 principles upon which to work. 



Though fruit is everywhere cultivated, there is no actual 

 export trade in it except in a few places. Many parts of 

 northern India grow fruit for the Calcutta and other markets ; 

 in Ceylon there are considerable areas of bananas for the 

 supply of the towns, and in southern Brazil there are extensive 

 orchards of oranges, mangoes, pears, apples, pineapples, straw- 

 berries, and other fruits for the supply of Rio de Janeiro, Sao 

 Paulo, and other towns. There is an actual export trade in 

 fruit upon a noteworthy scale only in Central America, where 

 the West Indies, Nicaragua, etc., grow fruit, chiefly bananas, for 

 the United States and Europe, Jamaica in 1919 exporting 

 1,218,000 worth of fruit. 



The most popular fruit with the people of colder climates is 

 of course the plantain or banana (Musa paradisiaca), which is 

 now consumed in very large quantities, and is largely cultivated 

 for the market in Nicaragua, the West Indies and the Canary 



