13. De Banana

The title which heads this paper is intended to be Latin, and is
modelled on the precedent of the De Amicitia, De Senectute, De Corona,
and other time-honoured plagues of our innocent boyhood. It is meant to
give dignity and authority to the subject with which it deals, as well
as to rouse curiosity in the ingenuous breast of the candid reader, who
may perhaps mistake it, at first sight, for negro-English, or for the
name of a distinguished Norman family. In anticipation of the possible
objection that the word 'Banana' is not strictly classical, I would
humbly urge the precept and example of my old friend Horace--enemy I
once thought him--who expresses his approbation of those happy
innovations whereby Latium was gradually enriched with a copious
vocabulary. I maintain that if Banana, bananæ, &c., is not already a
Latin noun of the first declension, why then it ought to be, and it
shall be in future. Linnæus indeed thought otherwise. He too assigned
the plant and fruit to the first declension, but handed it over to none
other than our earliest acquaintance in the Latin language, Musa. He
called the banana _Musa sapientum_. What connection he could possibly
conceive between that woolly fruit and the daughters of the ægis-bearing
Zeus, or why he should consider it a proof of wisdom to eat a
particularly indigestible and nightmare-begetting food-stuff, passes my
humble comprehension. The muses, so far as I have personally noticed
their habits, always greatly prefer the grape to the banana, and wise
men shun the one at least as sedulously as they avoid the other.

Let it not for a moment be supposed, however, that I wish to treat the
useful and ornamental banana with intentional disrespect. On the
contrary, I cherish for it--at a distance--feelings of the highest
esteem and admiration. We are so parochial in our views, taking us as a
species, that I dare say very few English people really know how
immensely useful a plant is the common banana. To most of us it
envisages itself merely as a curious tropical fruit, largely imported at
Covent Garden, and a capital thing to stick on one of the tall
dessert-dishes when you give a dinner-party, because it looks
delightfully foreign, and just serves to balance the pine-apple at the
opposite end of the hospitable mahogany. Perhaps such innocent readers
will be surprised to learn that bananas and plantains supply the
principal food-stuff of a far larger fraction of the human race than
that which is supported by wheaten bread. They form the veritable staff
of life to the inhabitants of both eastern and western tropics. What the
potato is to the degenerate descendant of Celtic kings; what the oat is
to the kilted Highlandman; what rice is to the Bengalee,