50 The Humming Bird. 



first place, far more nutritious and a hundredfold more fruitful. 

 At the best the Irish tuber yields only food, and, by a process 

 with which the excise are not supposed to be acquainted, an 

 uncommonly poor description of very ardent spirit. But the 

 banana is excellent food, and, with a little manipulation, gives 

 a beverage largely consumed over the whole of Central Africa. 

 It is capable of providing shelter quite sufficient for the wants 

 of the dwellers in the sun lands, and its fibre is, for the 

 purpose of weaving, preferable to cotton or flax. An Indian 

 — say in Central America — or a negro in Uganda, may, when 

 he plants an acre of bananas, dismiss from his mind any 

 anxiety as to the future. It is impossible to imagine a crop more 

 easily reaped. With a little care the plants may be made to 

 bear practically all the year round, and as a bunch will weigh 

 from twenty to eighty pounds, it is clear that to lay in stores 

 for a frugal household (to whom a yard of cotton apiece is an 

 ample wardrobe) is a briefer and easier task than even digging 

 a bucket of potatoes or husking a bushel of maize. And there 

 is no comparing the productive powers of the two vegetables. 

 An imperial acre of bananas is estimated to produce forty-four 

 times more by weight than the potato, and one hundred and 

 thirty five more than wheat. Unripe, the banana is excellent 

 boiled as a vegetable, or, as all who have visited the West 

 Indies must recall, sliced and fried as fritters for breakfast. 

 As a fully ripe fruit most of us know it, even in the immature 

 condition in which it reaches the English markets from the 

 Azores and other Southern countries. Roasted and flavoured 

 with the juice of oranges and lemons, and sugar, and made 

 into a kind of compote, it is excellent ; and in Monbuttu, in 

 Central Africa — and elsewhere — the fruit is dried, in which 

 condition it can be preserved for months, or, if spices and 

 sugar are added, it is formed into a paste quite capable of 

 being kept good for years. The mealier ones, by being oven 

 or sun dried, and then pounded, can be readily converted into 

 a nutritious flour, which contains not only starch, but protein, 

 or flesh forming material. 



But the food-yielding properties of the banana do not 

 end here. There is a wild species — the " Ensete " — of Aby- 

 ssinia, the fruit of which is dry and inedible, though the base 

 of the flower stalk can be cooked and eaten. When soft, 

 like a turnip well cooked and flavoured with butter or milk. 

 Bruce declared it to be " the best of all food — wholesome, 

 nourishing, and easily digested," an eulogy which must, how- 

 ever, be discounted by the fact that the Scottish traveller 



