food-stuff of all the equatorial region in both hemispheres, is gathered green and roasted as a vegetable, or, to use the more expressive West Indian negro phrase, as a bread-kind.  Millions of human beings in Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean live almost entirely on the mild and succulent but tasteless plantain.  Some people like the fruit; to me personally it is more suggestive of a very flavourless over-ripe pear than of anything else in heaven or earth or the waters that are under the earth—­the latter being the most probable place to look for it, as its taste and substance are decidedly watery.  Baked dry in the green state ‘it resembles roasted chestnuts,’ or rather baked parsnip; pulped and boiled with water it makes ’a very agreeable sweet soup,’ almost as nice as peasoup with brown sugar in it; and cut into slices, sweetened, and fried, it forms ’an excellent substitute for fruit pudding,’ having a flavour much like that of potatoes a la maitre d’hotel served up in treacle.

Altogether a fruit to be sedulously avoided, the plantain, though millions of our spiritually destitute African brethren haven’t yet for a moment discovered that it isn’t every bit as good as wheaten bread and fresh butter.  Missionary enterprise will no doubt before long enlighten them on this subject, and create a good market in time for American flour and Manchester piece-goods.

Though by origin a Malayan plant, there can be little doubt that the banana had already reached the mainland of America and the West India Islands long before the voyage of Columbus.  When Pizarro disembarked upon the coast of Peru on his desolating expedition, the mild-eyed, melancholy, doomed Peruvians flocked down to the shore and offered him bananas in a lordly dish.  Beds composed of banana leaves have been discovered in the tombs of the Incas, of date anterior, of course, to the Spanish conquest.  How did they get there?  Well, it is clearly an absurd mistake to suppose that Columbus discovered America; as Artemus Ward pertinently remarked, the noble Red Indian had obviously discovered it long before him.  There had been intercourse of old, too, between Asia and the Western Continent; the elephant-headed god of Mexico, the debased traces of Buddhism in the Aztec religion, the singular coincidences between India and Peru, all seem to show that a stream of communication, however faint, once existed between the Asiatic and American worlds.  Garcilaso himself, the half-Indian historian of Peru, says that the banana was well known in his native country before the conquest, and that the Indians say ‘its origin is Ethiopia.’  In some strange way or other, then, long before Columbus set foot upon the low sandbank of Cat’s Island, the banana had been transported from Africa or India to the Western hemisphere.