DE BANANA 219 



Still, I will frankly admit that the banana itself, with 

 its practically almost identical relation, the plantain, is a 

 real bit of tropical foliage. I confess to a settled prejudice 

 against the tropics generally, but I allow the sunsets, the 

 coco-nuts, and the bananas. The true stem creeps under- 

 ground, and sends up each year an upright branch, thickly 

 covered with majestic broad green leaves, somewhat like 

 those of the canna cultivated in our gardens as ' Indian shot,' 

 but far larger, nobler, andhandsomer. They sometimes mea- 

 sure from six to ten feet in length, and their thick midrib 

 and strongly marked diverging veins give them a very 

 lordly and graceful appearance. But they are apt in prac- 

 tice to suffer much from the fury of the tropical storms. The 

 wind rips the leaves up between the veins as far as the 

 midrib in tangled tatters ; so that after a good hurricane 

 they look more like coco-nut palm leaves than like single 

 broad masses of foliage as they ought properly to do. This, 

 of course, is the effect of a gentle and balmy hurricane a 

 mere capful of wind that tears and tatters them. After a 

 really bad storm (one of the sort when you tie ropes round 

 your wooden house to prevent its falling bodily to pieces, 

 I mean) the bananas are all actually blown down, and the 

 crop for that season utterly destroyed. The apparent stem, 

 being merely composed of the overlapping and sheathing 

 leaf-stalks, has naturally very little stability; and the 

 soft succulent trunk accordingly gives way forthwith at the 

 slightest onslaught. This liability to be blown down in 

 high winds forms the weak point of the plantain, viewed 

 as a food-stuff crop. In the South Sea Islands, where 

 there is little shelter, the poor Fijian, in cannibal days, 

 often lost his one means of subsistence from this cause, 

 and was compelled to satisfy the pangs of hunger on the 

 plump persons of his immediate relatives. But since the 

 introduction of Christianity, and of a dwarf stout wind- 



