DE BANANA 229 



much of the rope that we use in our houses comes from the 

 same singular origin. I know nothing more strikingly 

 illustrative of the extreme complexity of our modern civili- 

 sation than the way in which we thus every day employ 

 articles of exotic manufacture in our ordinary life without 

 ever for a moment suspecting or inquiring into their true 

 nature. "What lady knows when she puts on her delicate 

 wrapper, from Liberty's or from Swan and Edgar's, that 

 the material from which it is woven is a Malayan plantain 

 stalk ? Who ever thinks that the glycerine for our chapped 

 hands comes from Travancore coco-nuts, and that the 

 pure butter supplied us from the farm in the country is 

 coloured yellow with Jamaican annatto? We break a 

 tooth, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out, because 

 the grape-curers of Zante are not careful enough about 

 excluding small stones from their stock of currants ; and 

 we suffer from indigestion because the Cape wine-grower 

 has doctored his light Burgundies with Brazilian logwood 

 and white rum, to make them taste like Portuguese port. 

 Take merely this very question of dessert, and how in- 

 tensely complicated it really is. The West Indian bananas 

 keep company with sweet St. Michaels from the Azores, 

 and with Spanish cobnuts from Barcelona. Dried fruits 

 from Metz, figs from Smyrna, and dates from Tunis lie 

 side by side on our table with Brazil nuts and guava jelly 

 and damson cheese and almonds and raisins. We forget 

 where everything comes from nowadays, in our general 

 consciousness that they all come from the Queen Victoria 

 Street Stores, and any real knowledge of common objects 

 is rendered every day more and more impossible by the 

 bewildering complexity and variety, every day increasing, 

 of the common objects themselves, their substitutes, 

 adulterates, and spurious imitations. Why, you probably 

 never heard of manilla hemp before, until this very minute, 



