This shows that while of valuable nutritive elements, the nineteen fresh vegetables have 11.3 parts and the ten varieties of succulent fruits have 12.1 parts, the bananas have 15.5 parts. From this it appears, also, that if the fresh fruits and vegetables were actually worth, as food, say $1.17, bananas of like weight would be worth 38 cents more. [Illustration: HARD LABOR AMONG THE BANANAS] Statements made by other analysts seem to warrant the deduction that the nutritive value of a ton of potatoes, at one cent per pound, is 19 cents more than that of a ton of bananas at the same price. There is a difference, too, in the cost of production of a ton of potatoes and the cost of raising a ton of bananas. The field for potatoes must be plowed and harrowed in the spring, the seed dropped in furrows, which are then to be covered, after which comes cultivating again and again until the time has come for digging and picking, carting, sacking and hauling, often to a distant market. Luckily for the millions who have depended so largely on the banana for sustenance, the plant has few, if any, insect enemies and diseases, in which they differ somewhat from some fruits and tubers of the North. Many times an assertion has been printed to the effect that Humboldt said that an acre of bananas yields forty-four times as much food as does an acre of wheat. In the year 1902 the average yield of wheat in the United States equalled 12.79 bushels, or 767.4 pounds. This had a food value equal to nearly one-third that of the average output of bananas from an acre. It is often said that one pound of bananas has as much nutrition as has a pound of beef. The truth is that one pound of beef is worth three and one-third pounds of bananas. Bananas are far enough ahead of the harvests the farmer of the North gets, without making exaggerated claims for the fruit of the tropics. So the planter of bananas has each year four and a half times as much palatable food from an acre as the farmer gets from his potatoes: and there is the further difference that the one has bananas at no other cost than that of keeping down bush and grass and vine, that would quickly cover every spot to which the sunshine could penetrate, along the edges of the plantation. For bananas yield year after year without replanting. Each new stalk springs from the foot of its parent, grows to a height of fifteen to thirty-five feet, bears its burden of luscious fruit, and dies; but not before it has sent up from its own root new stalks to fruit and die--and so on through the centuries.