228 DE BANANA 



Vineland, and how the ^Icxican empire had some know- 

 ledge of Accadian astronomy, people are beginning to dis- 

 cover that Columbus himself was after all an egregious 

 humbug. 



In the old world the cultivation of the banana and the 

 plantain goes back, no doubt, to a most immemorial anti- 

 quity. Our Aryan ancestor himself, Professor Max Midler's 

 especial protcfjc^ had already invented several names for it, 

 which duly survive in very classical Sanskrit. The Greeks 

 of Alexander's expedition saw it in India, where * sages 

 reposed beneath its shade and ate of its fruit, whence the 

 botanical name, Musa sapientuni.' As the sages in ques- 

 tion were lazy Brahmans, always celebrated for their 

 immense capacity for doing nothing, the report, as quoted 

 by Pliny, is no doubt an accurate one. But the accepted 

 derivation of the word Musa from an Arabic original seems 

 to me highly uncertain ; for Linnteus, who first bestowed 

 it on the genus, called several other allied genera by such 

 cognate names as Urania and Heliconia. If, therefore, 

 the father of botany knew tliat his own word was originally 

 Arabic, we cannot acquit him of the high crime and 

 misdemeanour of deliberate punning. Should the Royal 

 Society get wind of this, something serious would doubt- 

 less happen ; for it is well known that the possession of a 

 sense of humour is absolutely fatal to the pretensions of a 

 man of science. 



Besides its main use as an article of food, the banana 

 serves incidentally to supply a valuable fibre, obtained from 

 the stem, and employed for weaving into textile fabrics and 

 making paper. Several kinds of the plantain tribe are 

 cultivated for this purpose exclusively, the best known 

 among them being the so-called manilla hemp, a plant 

 largely grown in the Philippine Islands. Many of the 

 finest Indian shawls are woven from banana stems, and 



