HORTICULTURAL JOURNAL. 217 



Setting aside the cultivation of fruits which serve rather pleasure than 

 necessity, there remain but three aborescent vegetables in the whole world 

 which can be included among the true food-plants, namely, the Bread-fruit, 

 the Cocoa-nut and the Date, which actually furnish the chief proportion of 

 the food of great bodies of men, and over widely-extended areas, and thence 

 have become objects of culture ; the Cycadacece and Sago-palms, on account 

 of their starchy parenchyma, can at most perhaps be taken into our reckon- 

 ing only in a very limited circle in the East Indies. 



All the rest of the food-plants are either such as possess a subterraneous, 

 usually tuberous stem, which sends up shoots above the soil, persisting but 

 a few months, on which develope flowers and fruit, while during the remain- 

 ing time, sleeping, as it were, beneath the protecting coverlet of earth, it 

 sets the disfavor of the climate at defiance, or such as die at the end of a 

 short period of vegetation, and insure the future reproduction, in the slumber- 

 ing germ of the seed. To the former belong, for instance, the Potato, derived 

 from the Cordilleras of Chili, Peru, and Mexico ; to the latter, almost all 

 our corn-plants. 



One plant alone distinguishes itself among the cultivated plants by a 

 peculiar mode of vegetation, a plant which was perhaps the earliest gift of 

 Nature to Man awakening to life, and thus the object of the earliest cul- 

 ture, I mean the Banana.* And this plant was not merely the first, but 

 the most valuable gift of Nature ; its slightly aromatic, sweet, and nutritive 

 fruits are the sole, or at least the chief food of the major part of the inhabi- 

 tants of the hotter regions. A creeping subterraneous root-stalk sends out 

 on high, from lateral buds, a shaft fifteen to twenty feet long, which con- 

 sists merely of the rolled-up, sheath-like leaf-stalks, bearing the velvet-like 

 glancing leaves, often ten feet long and two feet broad ; the midrib of the 

 leaf alone is firm and thick, but the blade of the leaf on either side so deli- 

 cate, that it is readily torn by the wind, whence the leaf acquires a peculiar 

 feathery aspect. Among the leaves presses up the rich cluster of flowers, 

 which, within three months after the shoot has risen, forms from 150 to 180 

 ripe fruits, about the size and form of a Cucumber. The fruits weigh, alto- 

 gether, about 70 or 801bs., and the same space which will bear lOOOlbs. of 

 Potatoes, brings forth, in a much shorter time, 44,0001bs. of Bananas; and 

 if we take account of the nutritious matter which this fruit contains, a sur- 

 face which, sown with Wheat, feeds one man, planted with Bananas affords 

 sustenance for five and twenty. Nothing strikes the European, landing in 



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*Musa sapientum. 



