16 THE BANANA 



varieties ? Do the cultivated varieties ever produce seed 

 without the intervention of man ? Is it possible for 

 cultivators to make their plants seed ? Could varieties 

 be raised from seed with fruit of improved flavour or 

 better keeping quality, or varieties immune from disease ? 



As to the origin of seedless varieties of fruit, there are 

 several species of Musa of which the fruit has no pulp, 

 but consists merely of the outer shell and large seeds filling 

 up the shell like a pea-pod and its seeds, the peas ; other 

 varieties have a small amount of pulp. The pulp is of 

 greater value in this case as food than the seeds. Primitive 

 man, whose food was precarious, was always keen in the 

 matter of selecting food-plants and preserving varieties 

 that were promising, and no doubt took care of the suckers 

 of a banana which yielded pulpy fruit, just as the Arabs 

 grow suckers from date palms that are known to bear good 

 fruit. The selection would be continuous, and whenever 

 a variation occurred with a larger amount of pulp and a 

 corresponding fewness of seeds, it would be carefully 

 treasured and the suckers planted instead of those with 

 little pulp and many seeds. There is no difficulty what- 

 ever in understanding how the seedless banana has arrived, 

 nor in understanding how varieties of the seedless type 

 have occurred and been propagated from time to time. 

 An improvement on the ordinary fruit occurred in 

 Martinique, and eighty years ago M. Jean Francois 

 Pouyat, although he may not have been the first to notice 

 it or the first to propagate it, was yet sufficiently alive to 

 its importance to introduce it into Jamaica.* This 

 variety, called at first the Pouyat banana, or the Marti- 

 nique banana, has become the only one that is cultivated 

 in Jamaica, Costa Rica, and elsewhere for export, and is 

 known now as the Jamaican or Gros Michel banana. 



Quite lately specimens of a sport of the Canary Banana 

 (Musa Cavendishii) have been received by the writer from 

 Dr. G. V. Perez, of Teneriffe. The sport is about double 



* Bulletin of the Botanical Department, Jamaica, vol. viii. pp. 155-6 

 (1901). 



