unsophisticated nursery, but in the pampered dining-room it requires the
aid of toasted parmesan. Good modern cookery is the practical result of
centuries of experience in this direction; the final flower of ages of
evolution, devoted to the equalisation of flavours in all human food.
Think of the generations of fruitless experiment that must have passed
before mankind discovered that mint sauce (itself a cunning compound of
vinegar and sugar) ought to be eaten with leg of lamb, that roast goose
required a corrective in the shape of apple, and that while a
pre-established harmony existed between salmon and lobster, oysters were
ordained beforehand by nature as the proper accompaniment of boiled cod.
Whenever I reflect upon such things, I become at once a good Positivist,
and offer up praise in my own private chapel to the Spirit of Humanity
which has slowly perfected these profound rules of good living.

DE BANANA

The title which heads this paper is intended to be Latin, and is
modelled on the precedent of the De Amicitia, De Senectute, De Corona,
and other time-honoured plagues of our innocent boyhood. It is meant to
give dignity and authority to the subject with which it deals, as well
as to rouse curiosity in the ingenuous breast of the candid reader, who
may perhaps mistake it, at first sight, for negro-English, or for the
name of a distinguished Norman family. In anticipation of the possible
objection that the word 'Banana' is not strictly classical, I would
humbly urge the precept and example of my old friend Horace--enemy I
once thought him--who expresses his approbation of those happy
innovations whereby Latium was gradually enriched with a copious
vocabulary. I maintain that if Banana, bananae, &c., is not already a
Latin noun of the first declension, why then it ought to be, and it
shall be in future. Linnaeus indeed thought otherwise. He too assigned
the plant and fruit to the first declension, but handed it over to none
other than our earliest acquaintance in the Latin language, Musa. He
called the banana _Musa sapientum_. What connection he could possibly
conceive between that woolly fruit and the daughters of the aegis-bearing
Zeus, or why he should consider it a proof of wisdom to eat a
particularly indigestible and nightmare-begetting food-stuff, passes my
humble comprehension. The muses, so far as I have personally noticed
their habits, always greatly prefer the grape to the banana, and wise