. CHAPTER VI. 
Fruits and Flowers of the Bahamas. Fruit in the Bills of Fare. Special 
Notice of the Orange, the Banana, the Pine Apple, the Sapodilla, the Cocoa- 
nut, the Hog Plum, the Shaddock, and the Forbidden Fruit. The Flowering 
Trees, Shrubs and Vines. 
‘Pomona bore me to her citron groves, 
To where the lemon and the piercing lime, 
With the deep orange glowing through the green, 
Their varied glories blend.”—THompson. 
‘Gorgeous flowrets in the sunlight shining, 
Blossoms flaunting in the eye of day, 
Tremulous leaves, with soft and silver lining, 
Buds that open only to decay.” 
WHETHER we adopt the theory that nature has stocked the 
earth with luscious fruits for man’s benefit, or created man for the 
benefit of the fruit, and to secure its more perfect development 
from the sour, crabbed, wild, unseemly, primitive condition, in 
which, when uncultivated, it exists, we must admit that fruit is 
an important, if not an essential factor, in the problem of the 
health and happiness of the human race. At all stages, and in 
all conditions of life, man craves and requires the ripened fruits 
in their season. One of the pleasures incident to visiting foreign 
lands arises from the opportunity which is thus afforded to pluck 
and eat them in their freshness and maturity. In these days of 
rapid transit by sea and land, when the ends and distant corners 
of the earth are brought together, and space is almost annihilated, 
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