It is safe to assume that more than $6,000,000 was paid in the year 1902, in Central America alone, to planters of bananas. Nearly all of that was paid by products of American farms, factories and forests. Farmer, manufacturer and miner, lumberman, railroad man and sailor, merchant and broker of this country, are all concerned in and benefited by the work done in shady aisles beneath banana leaves on the banks of tropic rivers. Bananas reach their best estate on the low, deep alluvium near the Caribbean coast, where the temperature never sinks below 60° and is seldom below 80° F. Such low lands serve all the better if flooded two or three times in the year, for the banana will drink much water, and such floods bring silt from the hills, and thus keep the ground fertilized without cost to the owner. In 1897 famed banana fields of the Rio Escondido were so deeply flooded that the steamship “Saga” voyaged through the main streets of Rama, fully sixty miles from the mouth of the river, to pick off from their roofs the dwellers in that town. The bananas barely showed their tops above the yellow flood. Along the coast flew reports that the plantations were ruined; subscriptions were asked to help the planters: and three months later they were harvesting better crops than in years before. Their plantations had been so enriched that they bore most bountifully. Bananas may be grown wherever there is some moisture and no near approach to the frost line; but a touch of frost cuts down the banana as a breath from a fiery furnace would blight a tender lily. The city of Tegucigalpa is 3,600 feet above the level of the sea, yet in that town is a field some thirty feet above the current in the swift river which it borders. It is very dry during months of each year, but in that field are plátanos which reach a height of more than twenty feet and bear bunches enough comfortably to support the owner. In narrow cañon and wider valley near that place are many patches of bananas which bring to their planters a sufficient income. And at that altitude the mercury sometimes falls below 65° Fahrenheit.