First there are bananas, the cucumber-shaped fruits which are the food of millions of human beings. From India and the Sunda Islands this beneficent tree has spread to Africa and the Mediterranean coasts, to Mexico and Central America. Its floury-white flesh, juicy and saccharine, fragrant and well-flavoured, is an excellent article of food. The large leaves of the banana are useful for various purposes--sunshades, roof thatch, etc. When the hot season comes, how pleasant it is to dream in the shadow of the mango-tree! The tree is about sixty feet high, and the shadow beneath its bluish-grey leathery leaves is close and dense. The pulp of the fruit is golden yellow and juicy, rich in sugar and citric acid. It is difficult to describe the taste, for it is very peculiar; but it is certainly delicious. From their home in China and Cochin China the orange and its smaller brother, the mandarin, have spread over India and far around. Amongst the many other fruits which abound in India are grapes, melons, apples and pears, walnuts and figs. Figs are green before they ripen, and then they turn yellow. The fig-tree is distributed over the whole world wherever the heat is sufficient. It is mentioned both in the Old and the New Testament. Under a kind of fig-tree Buddha acquired wisdom in the paths of religion, and therefore the tree is called _Ficus religiosa_. _Nymphaea stellaris_, the lotus flower, which, like the water-lily, floats on water, is another plant of great renown among Buddhists. The lotus is an emblem of their religion, as the Cross is of Christianity. In India a large quantity of rice is cultivated. In the north-eastern angle of the Indian triangle, Bengal and Assam, in Burma, on the peninsula of Further India (the Malay Peninsula), as well as in the Deccan, the southern extremity of the triangle, rice cultivation is extensively developed. Wheat is grown in the north-west, and cotton in the inland parts of the country. The cotton bush has large yellow flowers, and when the fruit, which is as large as a walnut, opens, the inside shows a quantity of seeds closely covered with soft woolly hairs. The fruit capsules are plucked off and dried in the sun. The fibre is removed from the seeds by a machine, and is cleaned and packed in bales which are pressed together and confined by iron bands, and then the article is ready for shipping to the manufacturing towns, of which Manchester is the most important. In India and Arabia the cotton bush has been cultivated for more than 2000 years, and Alexander the Great introduced it into Greece. Now there are plantations all over the world, but nowhere has the cultivation reached such perfection as in the United States of America.