212 Miscellaneous. 
‘Monograph of the British Desmidiee,’ either in microscopical ob- 
servation, by faithful outlines, or in the determination of any diffi- 
cult point. 
Mr. Hassall also is a gentleman whom I respect, and for most of 
my knowledge of the British Conjugate I am indebted to his kind- 
ness. I am, Gentlemen, your obedient servant, oe 
EDWARD JENNER. 
On the Disease of the Plantain. By Grorce R. Bonyun, M.D. 
Communicated by W. H. Campbell, Esq., LL.D., Secretary of the 
Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana. 
The varieties of the edible plantain, which are known and culti- 
vated throughout the West Indies, Africa and the East, are all of 
them reducible to two species, viz. the plantain and the banana (Musa 
paradisiaca and Musa sapientum). ‘The difference between these two 
plants is even so slight as to be scarcely specific ; it is therefore most 
probable that there was originally but one stock, from which they 
have by cultivation and change of locality been derived. It is there- 
fore necessary to determine with exactness, if possible, whether the 
plantain or banana (whichever be the parent stock) exists anywhere 
at present, or has been known to have existed as a perfect plant, that 
is, bearing fertile seeds, or whether it has always been in the imper- 
fect. state, that is, incapable of being procreated by seed, the only 
state in which it exists in this colony. . af | 
In the oldest botanical descriptions of the plantain, bakova, pisang, 
banana, bihai, or by whatever name it is known, it is invariably de- 
scribed as an anomalous plant not perfecting its seeds; nor is there 
any traveller who has described a plant which could be considered to 
be the plantain in its uncultivated state. 
In Gerard’s ‘ Herbal,’ printed in 1636, p. 1464, there is an excel- 
lent drawing of a bunch of plantains, and it is described as seedless. 
Plumier, in his ‘ Nova Plantarum Americanarum Genera,’ printed in 
1703, gives a like description of the plantain. _ Linnzeus, in his ‘ Spe- 
cies Plantarum,’ anno 1763, describes four species, Musa paradisiaca, 
sapientum, Bihai and Troglodytarum, which latter, on the authorit 
of Rumphius, he says, bears many seeds (hee gerit semina nadia’: 
He supposes the two former to be hybrids produced by impregnating 
the Bihai with some congeners unknown to him. Since Linnzus’s 
time the “‘ Bihai” has been found to belong to a different genus 
than Musa; it is now called Heliconia humilis, is a native of South 
America, and produces fertile seeds. Whether Linnzeus be right in 
his conjecture that the Bihai is the stock-plant of the plantain, it is 
almost impossible to ascertain; but the absence of any description 
of a wild seed-bearing plantain renders it highly probable that the 
cultivated species are hybrids produced long ago. The banana, from 
time immemorial, has been the food of the philosophers and sages of 
the East; and almost all travellers throughout the tropics have de- 
scribed these plants exactly as they are known to us, either as a 
sweet fruit eaten raw, or a-farinaceous vegetable roasted or boiled. 
