of Trinidad and Demerara are part and parcel of the very same
plants which grew and bore fruit a thousand years ago in the native
compounds of the Malay Archipelago.

In fact, I think there can be but little doubt that the banana is the
very oldest product of human tillage. Man, we must remember, is
essentially by origin a tropical animal, and wild tropical fruits must
necessarily have formed his earliest food-stuffs. It was among them of
course that his first experiments in primitive agriculture would be
tried; the little insignificant seeds and berries of cold northern
regions would only very slowly be added to his limited stock in
husbandry, as circumstances pushed some few outlying colonies northward
and ever northward toward the chillier unoccupied regions. Now, of all
tropical fruits, the banana is certainly the one that best repays
cultivation. It has been calculated that the same area which will
produce thirty-three pounds of wheat or ninety-nine pounds of potatoes
will produce 4,400 pounds of plantains or bananas. The cultivation of
the various varieties in India, China, and the Malay Archipelago dates,
says De Candolle, 'from an epoch impossible to realise.' Its diffusion,
as that great but very oracular authority remarks, may go back to a
period 'contemporary with or even anterior to that of the human races.'
What this remarkably illogical sentence may mean I am at a loss to
comprehend; perhaps M. de Candolle supposes that the banana was
originally cultivated by pre-human gorillas; perhaps he merely intends
to say that before men began to separate they sent special messengers on
in front of them to diffuse the banana in the different countries they
were about to visit. Even legend retains some trace of the extreme
antiquity of the species as a cultivated fruit, for Adam and Eve are
said to have reclined under the shadow of its branches, whence Linnaeus
gave to the sort known as the plantain the Latin name of _Musa
paradisiaca_. If a plant was cultivated in Eden by the grand old
gardener and his wife, as Lord Tennyson democratically styled them
(before his elevation to the peerage), we may fairly conclude that it
possesses a very respectable antiquity indeed.

The wild banana is a native of the Malay region, according to De
Candolle, who has produced by far the most learned and unreadable work
on the origin of domestic plants ever yet written. (Please don't give me
undue credit for having heroically read it