e punning. Should the Royal Society get wind of
this, something serious would doubtless happen; for it is well known
that the possession of a sense of humour is absolutely fatal to the
pretensions of a man of science.

Besides its main use as an article of food, the banana serves
incidentally to supply a valuable fibre, obtained from the stem, and
employed for weaving into textile fabrics and making paper. Several
kinds of the plantain tribe are cultivated for this purpose exclusively,
the best known among them being the so-called manilla hemp, a plant
largely grown in the Philippine Islands. Many of the finest Indian
shawls are woven from banana stems, and much of the rope that we use in
our houses comes from the same singular origin. I know nothing more
strikingly illustrative of the extreme complexity of our modern
civilisation than the way in which we thus every day employ articles of
exotic manufacture in our ordinary life without ever for a moment
suspecting or inquiring into their true nature. What lady knows when she
puts on her delicate wrapper, from Liberty's or from Swan and Edgar's,
that the material from which it is woven is a Malayan plantain stalk?
Who ever thinks that the glycerine for our chapped hands comes from
Travancore coco-nuts, and that the pure butter supplied us from the farm
in the country is coloured yellow with Jamaican annatto? We break a
tooth, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has pointed out, because the grape-curers
of Zante are not careful enough about excluding small stones from their
stock of currants; and we suffer from indigestion because the Cape
wine-grower has doctored his light Burgundies with Brazilian logwood and
white rum, to make them taste like Portuguese port. Take merely this
very question of dessert, and how intensely complicated it really is.
The West Indian bananas keep company with sweet St. Michaels from the
Azores, and with Spanish cobnuts from Barcelona. Dried fruits from Metz,
figs from Smyrna, and dates from Tunis lie side by side on our table
with Brazil nuts and guava jelly and damson cheese and almonds and
raisins. We forget where everything comes from nowadays, in our general
consciousness that they all come from the Queen Victoria Street Stores,
and any real knowledge of common objects is rendered every day more and
more impossible by the bewildering complexity and variety, every day
increasing, of the common objects themselves, their substitutes,
adulterates, and spu