persons, will yield sustenance under the banana to fifty. That eminent
naturalist and elegant writer, the Baron Von Humboldt, states
("Political Essay on New Spain," vol. ii.) that an acre of land
cultivated with plantains produces nearly twenty times as much food as
the like space sown with corn in Europe. He refers to a place in
Venezuela, where the most careful tillage was rendered to a piece of
land, yielding produce supporting a humble population residing in
huts, each placed in the centre of an enclosure, growing the sugar
cane, Indian corn, the Papaw tree, and the Musa--a tropical
garden!--upon the elaborate culture of which a whole family relied for
subsistence.

Although from the extensive plantain walks in our colonies--which are
seldom cultivated with a garden-like care--so large an average
proportion may not be obtained as twenty times the production of wheat
in Europe, yet I have had practical experience of the prodigious
quantity of farinaceous matter obtainable from an acre of tolerably
well-cultivated plantains, and no esculent plant requires less labor
in its culture upon land suitable for its production. They are readily
increased by suckers, which the old plants produce in abundance.

Lindley enumerates ten species of Musa, some of which grow to the
height of 25 or 30 feet, but that valuable species _M. Cavendishii_,
does not grow more than four or five feet high.

The bananas of the family of the Musaceae, appear to be natives of the
southern portion of the Asiatic continent (R. Brown, "Bot. of Congo,"
p. 51). Transplanted at an unknown epoch into the Indian Archipelago
and Africa, they have spread also into the, New World, and in general
into all intertropical countries, sometimes before the arrival of
Europeans.

According to Humboldt it affords, in a given extent of ground,
forty-four times more nutritive matter than the potato, and 133 times
more than wheat. These figures must be considered as only
approximative, since nothing is more difficult than to estimate the
nutritive qualities of different aliments.

_Musa paradisiaca_ is cultivated in Syria, to latitude 34 deg.
Humboldt says it ceases to yield fruit at a height of 3,000 feet,
where the mean annual temperature is 68 deg., and where, probably, the
heat of summer is deficient.

The banana seems, however, to be found no higher than 4,600 feet in a
state of perfection.

No fruit is so easily cultivated as are the varieties of the p