THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
99 
water and sweetened with the dark brown home-made sugar, 
when it forms a beverage that looks and tastes very much Hke 
new cider. With a pitcherful of this within reach, one is at 
a loss which most to admire, the climate which makes an abid- 
ing thirst possible, or the land that affords such pleasant means 
of satisfying it. Lemonade seems scarcely to be known, and 
lemons themselves are not plentiful, their place being taken by 
the lime which is essentially a small lemon. 
Jamaica's principal fruit, regarded from the monetary 
point of view, is the banana. Immense areas are now devoted 
to its culture and whole towns depend upon it for their pros- 
perity. The fruit goes to both the English and American 
markets and requires a large fleet of boats constantly plying 
between the ports of the two countries to meet the demand. 
All good Jamaicans must daily thank heaven that Americans 
have such fondness for the banana. The bunch of bananas 
have ceased to be a novelty even in our farthest backwoods 
towns, but the plant from which it comes would scarcely be 
recognized in many places. In respects it is like a great corn- 
stalk, but with much broader leaves, so broad, in fact, that 
the natives use them for umbrellas when caught in a storm. 
Each stalk produces a single bunch of fruit. In market these 
bunches are usually hung up with the fruit pointing toward 
the earth, and this is the way they begin life on the plant, but 
as the weight of the bunch increases ; it bends the stem so that 
at maturity they point upward. Beyond the bunch of fruit 
the stem extends for a foot or more in a scaly tail with a 
bunch of purplish bracts and sterile flowers at the end. 
Like oranges, bananas are not allowed to ripen on the 
plant, even for home consumption; in fact, it is considered an 
indication of extreme shiftlessness to allow them to ripen thus. 
As soon as the bunch is "full" the whole stalk that bore it is 
cut down and another from the same root takes its place. The 
price varies with the seasons, but it is not unusual for the culti- 
