And who knows that it has not?  Who knows that there have not been races who looked on it as the Red Indians looked on Mondamin, the maize-plant; as a gift of a god—­perhaps the incarnation of a god?  Who knows?  Whence did the ancestors of that plant come?  What was its wild stock like ages ago?  It is wild nowhere now on earth.  It stands alone and unique in the vegetable kingdom, with distant cousins, but no brother kinds.  It has been cultivated so long that though it flowers and fruits, it seldom or never seeds, and is propagated entirely by cuttings.  The only spot, as far as I am aware, in which it seeds regularly and plentifully, is the remote, and till of late barbarous Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. {312b}

There it regularly springs up in the second growth, after the forest is cleared, and bears fruits full of seed as close together as they can be pressed.  How did the plant get there?  Was it once cultivated there by a race superior to the now utterly savage islanders, and at an epoch so remote that it had not yet lost the power of seeding?  Are the Andamans its original home? or rather, was its original home that great southern continent of which the Andamans are perhaps a remnant?  Does not this fact, as well as the broader fact that different varieties of the Plantain and Banana girdle the earth round at the Tropics, and have girdled it as long as records go back, hint at a time when there was a tropic continent or archipelago round the whole equator, and at a civilisation and a horticulture to which those of old Egypt are upstarts of yesterday?  There are those who never can look at the Banana without a feeling of awe, as at a token of holy ancient the race of man may be, and how little we know of his history.

Most beautiful it is.  The lush fat green stem; the crown of huge leaves, falling over in curves like those of human limbs; and below, the whorls of green or golden fruit, with the purple heart of flowers dangling below them; and all so full of life, that this splendid object is the product of a few months.  I am told that if you cut the stem off at certain seasons, you may see the young leaf--remember that it is an endogen, and grows from within, like a palm, or a lily, or a grass—­actually move upward from within and grow before your eyes; and that each stem of Plantain will bear from thirty to sixty pounds of rich food during the year of its short life.

But, beside the grand Plantains and Bananas, there are other interesting plants, whose names you have often heard.  The tall plant with stem unbranched, but knotty and zigzag, and leaves atop like hemp, but of a cold purplish tinge, is the famous Cassava, {313a} or Manioc, the old food of the Indians, poisonous till its juice is squeezed out in a curious spiral grass basket.  The young Laburnums (as they seem), with purple flowers, are Pigeon-peas, {313b} right good to eat.  The creeping vines, like our Tamus, or Black Bryony, are Yams, {313c}—­best of all roots.