The plantain (Musa paradisaica) is one of the best gifts of Providence to the teeming multitudes of tropical lands, living, as many of them do, without stated homes, and gathering food and drink as they find them on the roadside and in the jungle.  Under a friendly palm the simple peasants find needed shelter from the sun by day and the dews by night, while a bunch of plantains or bananas plucked fresh from the tree will furnish an abundant meal, and the water of a green cocoa-nut all the drink they desire.  The plantain tree grows to about twenty feet in height, its round, soft stem being composed of the elongated foot-stalks of the leaves, and its cone of a nodding flower-spike or cluster of purple blossoms that are very graceful and beautiful.  Like the palms, this tree has no branches, but its smooth, glossy leaves are from six to eight feet in length and two or more in breadth.  At the root of a leaf a double row of fruit comes out half around the stalk; the stem then elongates a few inches, and another leaf is deflected, revealing another double row; and so on, till there come to be some thirty rows containing about two hundred plantains, weighing in all sixty or seventy pounds.  This mammoth bunch is the sole product of the tree for the time:  after the fruit is plucked the stalk is cut down, and another shoots up from the same root; and it is thus constantly renewed for many successive years.  The incalculable blessing of such a tree in regions where the intolerable heat renders all labor oppressive may be conceived from the estimate of Humboldt, who reckons the surface of ground needed to the production of four thousand pounds of ripe plantains to suffice for the raising of only thirty-three pounds of wheat or ninety-nine pounds of potatoes.  What would induce the indolent East Indian to make the exchange of crops?

The cassew-nut (Anacardium occidentale) is remarkable as the only known fruit of which the seed grows on the outside.  A full-grown tree is twenty feet high, with graceful form and widespread branches.  The leaves are oval, and the beautiful crimson flowers grow in clusters.  The fruit is pear-shaped, of a purplish color outside and bright yellow within; and the seed, which is in the form of a crescent, looks just as if it had been stuck on the bur end, instead of growing there.  When roasted the kernels are not unlike a very fine chestnut.

The guava (Psidium pomiferum), of which the noted Indian jelly is made, is about the size and shape of our sugar pears—­pale, yellowish-green externally, and revealing, when opened, a soft, rose-colored pulp studded with tiny seeds.  Both taste and odor are very peculiar, and are seldom liked by foreigners till after long use.