one commoner here--it is so unlike aught else, so
perfect in itself, that, like a palm, it might well have become, in
early ages, an object of worship.

And who knows that it has not? Who knows that there have not been
races who looked on it as the Red Indians looked on Mondamin, the
maize-plant; as a gift of a god--perhaps the incarnation of a god?
Who knows? Whence did the ancestors of that plant come? What was
its wild stock like ages ago? It is wild nowhere now on earth. It
stands alone and unique in the vegetable kingdom, with distant
cousins, but no brother kinds. It has been cultivated so long that
though it flowers and fruits, it seldom or never seeds, and is
propagated entirely by cuttings. The only spot, as far as I am
aware, in which it seeds regularly and plentifully, is the remote,
and till of late barbarous Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.
{312b}

There it regularly springs up in the second growth, after the forest
is cleared, and bears fruits full of seed as close together as they
can be pressed. How did the plant get there? Was it once
cultivated there by a race superior to the now utterly savage
islanders, and at an epoch so remote that it had not yet lost the
power of seeding? Are the Andamans its original home? or rather,
was its original home that great southern continent of which the
Andamans are perhaps a remnant? Does not this fact, as well as the
broader fact that different varieties of the Plantain and Banana
girdle the earth round at the Tropics, and have girdled it as long
as records go back, hint at a time when there was a tropic continent
or archipelago round the whole equator, and at a civilisation and a
horticulture to which those of old Egypt are upstarts of yesterday?
There are those who never can look at the Banana without a feeling
of awe, as at a token of holy ancient the race of man may be, and
how little we know of his history.

Most beautiful it is. The lush fat green stem; the crown of huge
leaves, falling over in curves like those of human limbs; and below,
the whorls of green or golden fruit, with the purple heart of
flowers dangling below them; and all so full of life, that this
splendid object is the product of a few months. I am told that if
you cut the stem off at certain seasons, you may see the young leaf-
-remember that it is an endogen, and grows from within, like a palm,
or a lily, or a grass--actually move upwar