He admits, on Oviedo’s authority,[1514] its introduction by Father Thomas of Berlangas from the Canaries into San Domingo in 1516, whence it was introduced into other islands and the mainland.[1515] He recognizes the absence of any mention of the banana in the accounts of Columbus, Alonzo Negro, Pinzon, Vespuzzi, and Cortez. The silence of Hernandez, who lived half a century after Oviedo, astonishes him and appears to him a remarkable carelessness; “for,” he says,[1516] “it is a constant tradition in Mexico and on the whole of the mainland that the _platano arton_, and the _dominico_ were cultivated long before the Spanish conquest.” The author who has most carefully noted the different epochs at which American agriculture has been enriched by foreign products, the Peruvian Garcilasso de la Vega,[1517] says distinctly that at the time of the Incas, maize, quinoa, the potato, and, in the warm and temperate regions, bananas formed the staple food of the natives. He describes the _Musa_ of the valleys in the Andes; he even distinguishes the rarer species, with a small fruit and a sweet aromatic flavour, the _dominico_, from the common banana or _arton_. Father Acosta[1518] asserts also, although less positively, that the _Musa_ was cultivated by the Americans before the arrival of the Spaniards. Lastly, Humboldt adds from his own observation, “On the banks of the Orinoco, of the Cassiquaire or of the Beni, between the mountains of Esmeralda and the banks of the river Carony, in the midst of the thickest forests, almost everywhere that Indian tribes are found who have had no relations with European settlements, we meet with plantations of Manioc and bananas.” Humboldt suggests the hypothesis that several species or constant varieties of the Banana have been confounded, some of which are indigenous to the new world. Desvaux studied the specific question, and in a really remarkable work, published in 1814,[1519] he gives it as his opinion that all the bananas cultivated for their fruits are of the same species. In this species he distinguishes forty-four varieties, which he arranges in two groups; the large-fruited bananas (seven to fifteen inches long), and the small-fruited bananas (one to six inches), commonly called fig bananas. R. Brown, in 1818, in his work on the _Plants of the Congo_, p. 51, maintains also that no structural difference in the bananas cultivated in Asia and those in America prevents us from considering them as belonging to the same species. He adopts the name _Musa sapientum_, which appears to me preferable to that of _M. paradisiaca_ adopted by Desvaux, because the varieties with small fertile fruit appear to be nearer the condition of the wild _Musæ_ found in Asia.