There is, perhaps, no industry in Central America that is more attractive to men of small capital than banana growing, from the fact that the clearing of the land is effected cheaply, and from the small cost of after-cultivation, which is limited only to such clearing of weeds and undergrowth as may be sufficient to allow access to the trees, and the short time necessary to produce a paying crop. When the trees and brush that have been cut in clearing the land become sufficiently dry, they are burned, and the banana suckers are then planted among the charred remains and ashes, without any further preparation of the soil. The best results are obtained by giving the trees plenty of space, say from 15 to 18 feet apart. In about ten months the first fruit can be gathered; but in the second year the trees reach maturity, and by a proper management of the fruit stalks in a fair sized plantation a constant succession in the crop may be secured, and fruit gathered every week throughout the year. The only careful work necessary on a banana plantation is in handling the heavy bunches so as to avoid bruising them, as any such injury causes a black spot to appear, beneath which decay quickly begins as the fruit ripens. The natives have learned by experience when they cut into the fruit stalk so to gauge the strength of the blow as to cut just deep enough to cause the stalk to bend slowly over until the end of the bunch reaches the ground, when another slash with the machete severs it, and it is loaded carefully into the cart. A plantation of 40 manzanas (about 69 acres) will, during and after the second year, produce about 54,000 bunches. The lowest price paid for bunches for some years past is 37½ cents per bunch, which would give an annual value of the crop of $20,250, or more than double the expenditure for purchase of land, clearing, cultivating and gathering the crop, and all expenses to the end of the second year. As the cost of producing bananas after the first crop from a plantation is confined to cultivating and harvesting, which may be done for $10 per acre yearly, it is scarcely wonderful that Judge O’Hara, late U. S. Consul at Greytown, Nicaragua, a lawyer whose acute mind is trained to sifting evidence, reported to the Department of State at Washington regarding banana-growing on the Atlantic coast of that republic, that: