Each shaft produces its fruit but once, when it withers and dies; but new shoots spring forth from the root, and, before the year has elapsed, unfold themselves with the same luxuriance. Thus, without any other labour than now and then weeding the field, fruit follows upon fruit, and harvest upon harvest. A single bunch of bananas often weighs from sixty to seventy pounds, and Humboldt has calculated that thirty-three pounds of wheat and ninety-nine pounds of potatoes, require the same space of ground to grow upon as will produce 4,000 pounds of bananas.
This prodigality of Nature, seemingly so favourable to the human race, is however attended with great disadvantages; for where the life of man is rendered too easy, his best powers remain dormant, and he almost sinks to the level of the plant which affords him subsistence without labour. Exertion awakens our faculties as it increases our enjoyments, and well may we rejoice that wheat and not the banana ripens in our fields.
As the seeds of the cultivated plantain and banana never or very rarely come to maturity, they can only be propagated by suckers. ‘In both hemispheres,’ says Humboldt, ‘as far as tradition or history reaches, we find plantains cultivated in the tropical zone. It is as certain that African slaves have introduced, in the course of centuries, varieties of the banana into America, as that before the discovery of Columbus the plantain was cultivated by the aboriginal Indians.
‘These plants are the ornaments of humid countries. Like the farinaceous cereals of the north, they accompany man from the first infancy of his civilisation. Semitical traditions place their original home on the banks of the Euphrates; others, with greater probability, at the foot of the Himalayas. According to the Greek mythology, the plains of Enna were the fortunate birthplace of the cereals; but while the monotonous fields of the latter add but little to the beauty of the northern regions, the tropical husbandman multiplies in the banana one of the noblest forms of vegetable life.’
The Musaceæ are not only useful to man by their mealy, wholesome, and agreeable fruits, but also by the fibres of their long leaf-stalks. Some species furnish filaments for the finest muslin, and the coarse fibres of the _Musa textilis_, known in trade under the name of Manilla hemp, serve for the preparation of very durable cordage.