men shun the one at least as sedulously as they avoid the other.

Let it not for a moment be supposed, however, that I wish to treat the
useful and ornamental banana with intentional disrespect. On the
contrary, I cherish for it--at a distance--feelings of the highest
esteem and admiration. We are so parochial in our views, taking us as a
species, that I dare say very few English people really know how
immensely useful a plant is the common banana. To most of us it
envisages itself merely as a curious tropical fruit, largely imported at
Covent Garden, and a capital thing to stick on one of the tall
dessert-dishes when you give a dinner-party, because it looks
delightfully foreign, and just serves to balance the pine-apple at the
opposite end of the hospitable mahogany. Perhaps such innocent readers
will be surprised to learn that bananas and plantains supply the
principal food-stuff of a far larger fraction of the human race than
that which is supported by wheaten bread. They form the veritable staff
of life to the inhabitants of both eastern and western tropics. What the
potato is to the degenerate descendant of Celtic kings; what the oat is
to the kilted Highlandman; what rice is to the Bengalee, and Indian corn
to the American negro, that is the muse of sages (I translate literally
from the immortal Swede) to African savages and Brazilian slaves.
Humboldt calculated that an acre of bananas would supply a greater
quantity of solid food to hungry humanity than could possibly be
extracted from the same extent of cultivated ground by any other known
plant. So you see the question is no small one; to sing the praise of
this Linnaean muse is a task well worthy of the Pierian muses.

Do you know the outer look and aspect of the banana plant? If not, then
you have never voyaged to those delusive tropics. Tropical vegetation,
as ordinarily understood by poets and painters, consists entirely of the
coco-nut palm and the banana bush. Do you wish to paint a beautiful
picture of a rich ambrosial tropical island, _a la_ Tennyson--a summer
isle of Eden lying in dark purple spheres of sea?--then you introduce a
group of coco-nuts, whispering in odorous heights of even, in the very
foreground of your pretty sketch, just to let your public understand at
a glance that these are the delicious poetical tropics. Do you desire to
create an ideal paradise, _a la_ Bernardin de St. Pierre, where idyllic
Virginies die of pure modesty rather t