t the Indians say 'its origin is Ethiopia.' In some
strange way or other, then, long before Columbus set foot upon the low
sandbank of Cat's Island, the banana had been transported from Africa or
India to the Western hemisphere.

If it were a plant propagated by seed, one would suppose that it was
carried across by wind or waves, wafted on the feet of birds, or
accidentally introduced in the crannies of drift timber. So the coco-nut
made the tour of the world ages before either of the famous Cooks--the
Captain or the excursion agent--had rendered the same feat easy and
practicable; and so, too, a number of American plants have fixed their
home in the tarns of the Hebrides or among the lonely bogs of Western
Galway. But the banana must have been carried by man, because it is
unknown in the wild state in the Western Continent; and, as it is
practically seedless, it can only have been transported entire, in the
form of a root or sucker. An exactly similar proof of ancient
intercourse between the two worlds is afforded us by the sweet potato, a
plant of undoubted American origin, which was nevertheless naturalised
in China as early as the first centuries of the Christian era. Now that
we all know how the Scandinavians of the eleventh century went to
Massachusetts, which they called Vineland, and how the Mexican empire
had some knowledge of Accadian astronomy, people are beginning to
discover that Columbus himself was after all an egregious humbug.

In the old world the cultivation of the banana and the plantain goes
back, no doubt, to a most immemorial antiquity. Our Aryan ancestor
himself, Professor Max Mueller's especial _protege_, had already invented
several names for it, which duly survive in very classical Sanskrit. The
Greeks of Alexander's expedition saw it in India, where 'sages reposed
beneath its shade and ate of its fruit, whence the botanical name, _Musa
sapientum_.' As the sages in question were lazy Brahmans, always
celebrated for their immense capacity for doing nothing, the report, as
quoted by Pliny, is no doubt an accurate one. But the accepted
derivation of the word _Musa_ from an Arabic original seems to me highly
uncertain; for Linnaeus, who first bestowed it on the genus, called
several other allied genera by such cognate names as Urania and
Heliconia. If, therefore, the father of botany knew that his own word
was originally Arabic, we cannot acquit him of the high crime and
misdemeanour of deliberat