The banana, however, has very long resisted the inevitable tendency to degeneration in plants thus artificially and unhealthily propagated.  Potatoes have only been in cultivation for a few hundred years; and yet the potato constitution has become so far enfeebled by the practice of growing from the tuber that the plants now fall an easy prey to potato fungus, Colorado beetles, and a thousand other persistent enemies.  It is just the same with the vine—­propagated too long by layers or cuttings, its health has failed entirely, and it can no longer resist the ravages of the phylloxera or the slow attacks of the vine-disease fungus.  But the banana, though of very ancient and positively immemorial antiquity as a cultivated plant, seems somehow gifted with an extraordinary power of holding its own in spite of long-continued unnatural propagation.  For thousands of years it has been grown in Asia in the seedless condition, and yet it springs as heartily as ever still from the underground suckers.  Nevertheless, there must in the end be some natural limit to this wonderful power of reproduction, or rather of longevity; for, in the strictest sense, the banana bushes that now grow in the negro gardens of Trinidad and Demerara are part and parcel of the very same plants which grew and bore fruit a thousand years ago in the native compounds of the Malay Archipelago.

In fact, I think there can be but little doubt that the banana is the very oldest product of human tillage.  Man, we must remember, is essentially by origin a tropical animal, and wild tropical fruits must necessarily have formed his earliest food-stuffs.  It was among them of course that his first experiments in primitive agriculture would be tried; the little insignificant seeds and berries of cold northern regions would only very slowly be added to his limited stock in husbandry, as circumstances pushed some few outlying colonies northward and ever northward toward the chillier unoccupied regions.  Now, of all tropical fruits, the banana is certainly the one that best repays cultivation.  It has been calculated that the same area which will produce thirty-three pounds of wheat or ninety-nine pounds of potatoes will produce 4,400 pounds of plantains or bananas.  The cultivation of the various varieties in India, China, and the Malay Archipelago dates, says De Candolle, ‘from an epoch impossible to realise.’  Its diffusion, as that great but very oracular authority remarks, may go back to a period ‘contemporary with or even anterior to that of the human races.’  What this remarkably illogical sentence may mean I am at a loss to comprehend; perhaps M. de Candolle supposes that the banana was originally cultivated by pre-human gorillas; perhaps he merely intends to say that before men began to separate they sent special messengers on in front of them to diffuse the banana in the different countries they were about to visit.  Even legend retains some trace of the extreme antiquity of the