hen cut
across the middle, it ought to show three rows of seeds, interspersed
with pulp, and faintly preserving some dim memory of the dividing wall
which once separated them. In practice, however, the banana differs
widely from this theoretical ideal, as practice often _will_ differ
from theory; for it has been so long cultivated and selected by
man--being probably one of the very oldest, if not actually quite the
oldest, of domesticated plants--that it has all but lost the original
habit of producing seeds. This is a common effect of cultivation on
fruits, and it is of course deliberately aimed at by horticulturists, as
the seeds are generally a nuisance, regarded from the point of view of
the eater, and their absence improves the fruit, as long as one can
manage to get along somehow without them. In the pretty little
Tangierine oranges (so ingeniously corrupted by fruiterers into
mandarins) the seeds have almost been cultivated out; in the best
pine-apples, and in the small grapes known in the dried state as
currants, they have quite disappeared; while in some varieties of pears
they survive only in the form of shrivelled, barren, and useless pips.
But the banana, more than any other plant we know of, has managed for
many centuries to do without seeds altogether. The cultivated sort,
especially in America, is quite seedless, and the plants are propagated
entirely by suckers.

Still, you can never wholly circumvent nature. Expel her with a
pitchfork, _tamen usque recurrit_. Now nature has settled that the right
way to propagate plants is by means of seedlings. Strictly speaking,
indeed, it is the only way; the other modes of growth from bulbs or
cuttings are not really propagation, but mere reduplication by
splitting, as when you chop a worm in two, and a couple of worms wriggle
off contentedly forthwith in either direction. Just so when you divide a
plant by cuttings, suckers, slips, or runners; the two apparent plants
thus produced are in the last resort only separate parts of the same
individual--one and indivisible, like the French Republic. Seedlings are
absolutely distinct individuals; they are the product of the pollen of
one plant and the ovules of another, and they start afresh in life with
some chance of being fairly free from the hereditary taints or personal
failings of either parent. But cuttings or suckers are only the same old
plant over and over again in fresh circumstances, transplanted as it
were, b