where it certainly does not grow in the wild state? It must be remembered that the plantain is a tree-like herbaceous plant possessing no easily transportable bulbs like the potato or the dahlia, nor propagable by cuttings like the willow or the poplar. It has only a perennial root which, once planted, needs hardly any care, and yet produces the most abundant crop of any known tropical plant. On the average, a plantain annually bears nearly twenty kilogrammes, and sometimes a hundredweight, of most nutritious fruit, which at the same time possesses a delicious flavor. The stem then dies and the root gives out new shoots. No doubt the American race, closely allied as it is with the Mongolian, carried with it, when it migrated to America, the plantain as a cultivated plant from Asia where it grew wild. The plantain cannot have come from Africa or from Polynesia, where musa is also indigenous, for in that case African or Polynesian characters would exist in the aboriginal population of America. Some writers have supposed that this seedless, herbaceous, cultivated plant must have been introduced into America by shipwrecked seamen, because it can exist only in a tropical climate and in living specimens. But in our geological epoch a party of Mongolians shipwrecked in their primitive craft could never have reached the shores of America alive[1] at any point in the tropical zone, for they would be unprovided with sufficient food, and because the tropical distance between Asia and America is enormous, nearly thrice or four times as great as between Europe and America. Then, seamen are not wont to take living specimens of the plantain on their voyages; and, even if they did, these plants would be consumed as food in case of shipwreck.
Even if we suppose the plants to have escaped this fate, they would surely perish for want of fresh water. An hypothesis which rests on four improbabilities is worth nothing, and we might wager one against thousands of millions that no importation of the plantain into America has ever happened in that wise. The only hypothesis which remains is, that the importation took place while the polar regions enjoyed a tropical climate, and that the plantain was brought by the immigrating Asiatics by way of Kamtchatka and Alaska. This is the more probable, because many other tropical cultivated plants are in like manner propagated, not by seeds, but by "eyes," etc. Now, a cultivated plant which does not possess seeds must have been under culture for a very long period—we have not in Europe a single exclusively seedless, berry-bearing, cultivated plant—and hence it is perhaps fair to infer that these plants were cultivated as early as the beginning of the middle of the diluvial period. Moreover, the hypothesis of an immigration
- ↑ The Chinese and Japanese are acquainted with the plantain, and possess large ships in which pretty long voyages may be made. In the summer the plantain might live in the temperate zone. It can hardly be doubted that long before Columbus's time the junks of those peoples may have been wrecked on the Pacific coast of America. This seems an objection to the author's views.—Translator.
