THE PLANTAIN AND BANANA. 



319 



more easily and readily cultivated. There are two or three varie- 

 ties kuowTi in the Asiatic regions. The properties of this tree 

 are thus enumerated by Hooker: — The fruit serves for food; 

 clothes are made from the fibres of the inner bark ; the wood is 

 used for building houses and making boats ; the male catkins are 

 employed as tinder ; the leaves for table cloths and for wrapping 

 provisions in ; and the viscid milky juice alfords birdlime. 



A. integrifolia is the Jack or Jacca, the fruit of which attains a 

 large size, sometimes weighing 30 lbs., but is inferior in quality 

 to the bread-fruit. 



The nuts or fruit of Brosimum Alicastrum, an evergreen shrub, 

 native of Jamaica, are nutritious and agreeable articles of food. 

 AVhen boiled with salt fish, pork or beef, they have frequently been 

 the support of the negroes and poorer sorts of white people in 

 times of scarcity, and proved a wholesome and not unpleasant 

 food ; when roasted it eats something like our common chesnut, 

 and is called bread-nut. 



Kafir Bread. — According to Thunberg, the Hottentots being 

 very little acquainted with agriculture, or with the use of the 

 cerealia, and subsisting principally upon wild bulbs and fruits, 

 obtain food also from Encephalartos caffer, a species of Zamia, with 

 a cyHndrical trunk, the thickness of a man's body, and about seven 

 feet high. Haviog cut down a tree, they took out the pith, that 

 nearly fills its trunk, and which abounds in mucilage and an amy- 

 laceous fluid; after keeping this for some time buried under 

 ground in the skin of an animal, they reduced it by pounding and 

 kneading into a kmd of paste ; and then baked it in hot ashes, 

 in the form of round cakes, nearly an inch thick. The Dutch 

 colonists, in consequence of this practice of the natives, called 

 the plant brood-boon, which signifies literally bread tree. 



THE PLANTAIN AND BANANA. 



The several varieties of the edible plantain which are known 

 and cultivated throughout the West Indies, Africa, and in tiie 

 East are all reducible to two classes, viz., the Plantain and the 

 Banana (Mitsa Paradisiaca smd. sapie?ihcm). The difibrence be- 

 tween these two plants is even so slight as to be scarcely specific ; 

 it is therefore most probable that there was originally but one 

 stock, from which they have, b}^ cultivation and change of locality, 

 been derived. 



The tiger plantain (M. maculafa) and the black ditto (M. syl- 

 vestris) are cultivated in Jamaica. The 'ivhole of the species and 

 varieties of the tribe are what are called polygamous monoscious 

 plants, each individual tree bearing the male and female organs 

 of reproduction. 



The plantain and its varieties invariably bear male, female 

 and hermaphrodite flowers within the same spathe, all of 



