properly to do.  This, of course, is the effect of a gentle and balmy hurricane—­a mere capful of wind that tears and tatters them.  After a really bad storm (one of the sort when you tie ropes round your wooden house to prevent its falling bodily to pieces, I mean) the bananas are all actually blown down, and the crop for that season utterly destroyed.  The apparent stem, being merely composed of the overlapping and sheathing leaf-stalks, has naturally very little stability; and the soft succulent trunk accordingly gives way forthwith at the slightest onslaught.  This liability to be blown down in high winds forms the weak point of the plantain, viewed as a food-stuff crop.  In the South Sea Islands, where there is little shelter, the poor Fijian, in cannibal days, often lost his one means of subsistence from this cause, and was compelled to satisfy the pangs of hunger on the plump persons of his immediate relatives.  But since the introduction of Christianity, and of a dwarf stout wind-proof variety of banana, his condition in this respect, I am glad to say, has been greatly ameliorated.

By descent the banana bush is a developed tropical lily, not at all remotely allied to the common iris, only that its flowers and fruit are clustered together on a hanging spike, instead of growing solitary and separate as in the true irises.  The blossoms, which, though pretty, are comparatively inconspicuous for the size of the plant, show the extraordinary persistence of the lily type; for almost all the vast number of species, more or less directly descended from the primitive lily, continue to the very end of the chapter to have six petals, six stamens, and three rows of seeds in their fruits or capsules.  But practical man, with his eye always steadily fixed on the one important quality of edibility—­the sum and substance to most people of all botanical research—­has confined his attention almost entirely to the fruit of the banana.  In all essentials (other than the systematically unimportant one just alluded to) the banana fruit in its original state exactly resembles the capsule of the iris—­that pretty pod that divides in three when ripe, and shows the delicate orange-coated seeds lying in triple rows within—­only, in the banana, the fruit does not open; in the sweet language of technical botany, it is an indehiscent capsule; and the seeds, instead of standing separate and distinct, as in the iris, are embedded in a soft and pulpy substance which forms the edible and practical part of the entire arrangement.

This is the proper appearance of the original and natural banana, before it has been taken in hand and cultivated by tropical man.  When cut across the middle, it ought to show three rows of seeds, interspersed with pulp, and faintly preserving some dim memory of the dividing wall which once separated them.  In practice, however, the banana differs widely from this theoretical ideal, as practice often will differ from theory; for it has been so long cultivated