If it were a plant propagated by seed, one would suppose that it was carried across by wind or waves, wafted on the feet of birds, or accidentally introduced in the crannies of drift timber.  So the coco-nut made the tour of the world ages before either of the famous Cooks—­the Captain or the excursion agent—­had rendered the same feat easy and practicable; and so, too, a number of American plants have fixed their home in the tarns of the Hebrides or among the lonely bogs of Western Galway.  But the banana must have been carried by man, because it is unknown in the wild state in the Western Continent; and, as it is practically seedless, it can only have been transported entire, in the form of a root or sucker.  An exactly similar proof of ancient intercourse between the two worlds is afforded us by the sweet potato, a plant of undoubted American origin, which was nevertheless naturalised in China as early as the first centuries of the Christian era.  Now that we all know how the Scandinavians of the eleventh century went to Massachusetts, which they called Vineland, and how the Mexican empire had some knowledge of Accadian astronomy, people are beginning to discover that Columbus himself was after all an egregious humbug.

In the old world the cultivation of the banana and the plantain goes back, no doubt, to a most immemorial antiquity.  Our Aryan ancestor himself, Professor Max Mueller’s especial protege, had already invented several names for it, which duly survive in very classical Sanskrit.  The Greeks of Alexander’s expedition saw it in India, where ’sages reposed beneath its shade and ate of its fruit, whence the botanical name, Musa sapientum.’  As the sages in question were lazy Brahmans, always celebrated for their immense capacity for doing nothing, the report, as quoted by Pliny, is no doubt an accurate one.  But the accepted derivation of the word Musa from an Arabic original seems to me highly uncertain; for Linnaeus, who first bestowed it on the genus, called several other allied genera by such cognate names as Urania and Heliconia.  If, therefore, the father of botany knew that his own word was originally Arabic, we cannot acquit him of the high crime and misdemeanour of deliberate punning.  Should the Royal Society get wind of this, something serious would doubtless happen; for it is well known that the possession of a sense of humour is absolutely fatal to the pretensions of a man of science.

Besides its main use as an article of food, the banana serves incidentally to supply a valuable fibre, obtained from the stem, and employed for weaving into textile fabrics and making paper.  Several kinds of the plantain tribe are cultivated for this purpose exclusively, the best known among them being the so-called manilla hemp, a plant largely grown in the Philippine Islands.  Many of the finest Indian shawls are woven from banana stems, and much of the rope that we use in our houses comes from the same singular origin.  I know nothing