222 DE BANANA 



viduals ; tlicy arc the product of the pollen of one plant 

 and the ovules of another, and they start afresh in life with 

 some chance of being fairly free from the hereditary taints 

 or personal failings of either parent. But cuttings or 

 suckers are only the same old plant over and over again in 

 fresh circumstances, transplanted as it were, but not truly 

 renovated or rejuvenescent. That is the real reason why 

 our potatoes are now all going to — well, the same place as 

 the army has been going ever since the earliest memories 

 of the oldest officer in the whole service. We have gone 

 on growing potatoes over and over again from the tubers 

 alone, and hardly ever from seed, till the whole constitution 

 of the potato kind has become permanently enfeebled by 

 old age and dotage. The eyes (as farmers call them) are 

 only buds or underground branches ; and to plant potatoes 

 as we jsually do is nothing more than to multiply the 

 apparent scions by fission. Odd as it may sound to say so, 

 all the potato vines in a whole field are often, from the 

 strict biological point of view, parts of a single much- 

 divided individual. It is just as though one were to go on 

 cutting up a single worm, time after time, as soon as he 

 grew again, till at last the one original creature had mul- 

 tiplied into a whole colony of apparently distinct indivi- 

 duals. Yet, if the first worm happened to have the gout 

 or the rheumatism (metaphorically bpeaking), all the other 

 worms into which his compound personality had been 

 divided would doubtless suffer from the same complaints 

 throughout the whole of their joint lifetimes. 



The banana, however, has very long resisted the inevit- 

 able tendency to degeneration in plants thus artificially and 

 unhealthily propagated. Potatoes have only been in culti- 

 vation for a few hundred years ; and yet the potato 

 constitution has become so far enfeebled by the practice of 

 growing from the tuber that the plants now fall an easy 



