ut not truly renovated or rejuvenescent. That is the real reason
why our potatoes are now all going to--well, the same place as the army
has been going ever since the earliest memories of the oldest officer in
the whole service. We have gone on growing potatoes over and over again
from the tubers alone, and hardly ever from seed, till the whole
constitution of the potato kind has become permanently enfeebled by old
age and dotage. The eyes (as farmers call them) are only buds or
underground branches; and to plant potatoes as we usually do is nothing
more than to multiply the apparent scions by fission. Odd as it may
sound to say so, all the potato vines in a whole field are often, from
the strict biological point of view, parts of a single much-divided
individual. It is just as though one were to go on cutting up a single
worm, time after time, as soon as he grew again, till at last the one
original creature had multiplied into a whole colony of apparently
distinct individuals. Yet, if the first worm happened to have the gout
or the rheumatism (metaphorically speaking), all the other worms into
which his compound personality had been divided would doubtless suffer
from the same complaints throughout the whole of their joint lifetimes.

The banana, however, has very long resisted the inevitable tendency to
degeneration in plants thus artificially and unhealthily propagated.
Potatoes have only been in cultivation for a few hundred years; and yet
the potato constitution has become so far enfeebled by the practice of
growing from the tuber that the plants now fall an easy prey to potato
fungus, Colorado beetles, and a thousand other persistent enemies. It is
just the same with the vine--propagated too long by layers or cuttings,
its health has failed entirely, and it can no longer resist the ravages
of the phylloxera or the slow attacks of the vine-disease fungus. But
the banana, though of very ancient and positively immemorial antiquity
as a cultivated plant, seems somehow gifted with an extraordinary power
of holding its own in spite of long-continued unnatural propagation. For
thousands of years it has been grown in Asia in the seedless condition,
and yet it springs as heartily as ever still from the underground
suckers. Nevertheless, there must in the end be some natural limit to
this wonderful power of reproduction, or rather of longevity; for, in
the strictest sense, the banana bushes that now grow in the negro
gardens