328 ESSENTIALS OF BOTANY 
or more, and when well grown producing from one hun- 
dred to five hundred pounds of fruit a year. Successful 
attempts are now under way to introduce: date culture 
into some of the hottest portions of the United States, 
and it is likely to be an important industry in central 
Arizona, the Colorado Desert in 
California, and several other arid 
or semi-arid areas. 
The Pineapple family furnishes 
only one valuable fruit, the pine- 
apple, grown especially in Florida, 
the West Indies, the Azores, and 
Hawaii. 
The Banana family furnishes, in 
the shape of bananas, the main food 
of multitudes of the poorer inhab- 
itants of the tropics. The plant 
is herbaceous, though it sometimes 
reaches a height of forty feet, with 
leaves as much as ten feet long 
(Plate XIII). The familiar fruit 
(technically, a berry) has by long 
cultivation become seedless. It has 
a much higher nutritive value than 
most fruits and is rapidly coming 
into favor among us, the annual 
imports into the United States hav- 
ing increased from about 500,000 bunches in 1872 to some 
40,000,000 bunches at present. A few bananas are grown 
in southern Florida and the delta portion of the Mississippi, 
but the main product comes from the West Indies and 
Central America. 
Fie. 228. A Coffee Twig, 
with Berries. (Reduced.) 
