SOUTH AMERICA 219 



which are placed the suckers taken from old bananas ; 

 they are lightly covered with earth. Very soon the sucker 

 begins to vegetate and rapidly covers the ground with its 

 broad leaves. It grows so rapidly that in the course of a 

 year each plant will produce a fine bunch of bananas. 

 During this time the plant has only required two or three 

 hoeings with moulding proportionate to the height of the 

 plant. Every stem having flowered and ripened a bunch 

 is destined to perish ; it is therefore cut down at the time 

 of removing the bunch. But this first stem is replaced by 

 numerous suckers which have grown whilst the bunch was 

 growing and ripening ; these suckers are taken up except 

 two or three, each of which will give a bunch a few months 

 after the primary bunch was cut ; and this will follow in 

 the same course every year until the exhaustion of the 

 mother-plant, which is shown by a sensible diminution in 

 the vigour of the plant, and by the production of small 

 bunches which are often very defective. This exhaustion 

 can be kept back by good cultivation, and by taking care 

 not to allow any more suckers to grow than the fertility 

 of the soil permits the banana to nourish that is to say, 

 three in general, four at the most. There are bananeries 

 which, notwithstanding whatever may be done, are ex- 

 hausted at the end of seven or eight years ; whilst there are 

 others which remain in full vigour for twelve years. When 

 it becomes necessary to proceed to the pulling up of 

 the bananas, the soil will be found to contain, so to 

 speak, no more bananas or roots of trees ; they are for the 

 most part decomposed. Cassava may then be planted, or 

 sugar-cane. The soil is in fact far from being exhausted ; 

 it contains a proportion of humus quite as great as, if not 

 greater than, when it was cleared, on account of the 

 decomposition of the stems and leaves which were cut up 

 in small pieces and then spread upon the surface of the 

 ground. The banana plant produces an enormous quantity 

 of alimentary substance. According to observations made 

 in the Lower Parana, a hectare (2j acres) yields a harvest 

 of 50,000 kilogrammes (110,000 Ibs.) ; and it is neither 



