One plant alone distinguishes itself among the cultivated plants by a peculiar mode of vegetation, a plant which was perhaps the earliest gift of Nature to man awakening to life, and thus the object of the earliest culture; I mean the banana. And this plant was not merely the first, but the most valuable gift of Nature; its slightly aromatic, sweet and nutritive fruits are the sole, or at least the chief, food of the major part of the inhabitants of the hotter regions. A creeping subterraneous root-stock sends out on high, from lateral buds, a shaft fifteen to twenty feet long, which consists merely of the rolled-up, sheath-like leaf-stalks, bearing the velvet-like glancing leaves, often ten feet long and two feet broad; the midrib of the leaf alone is firm and thick, but the blade of the leaf on either side so delicate that it is readily torn by the wind, whence the leaf acquires a peculiar feathered aspect. Among the leaves presses up the rich cluster of flowers, which within three months after the shoot has arisen forms from 150 to 180 ripe fruits, about the size and form of a cucumber. The fruits weigh altogether about 70 or 80 pounds, and the same space which will bear 1,000 pounds of potatoes brings forth in a much shorter time 44,000 bananas; and if we take account of the nutritious matter which this fruit contains, a surface which, sown with wheat, feeds one man, planted with bananas, affords sustenance to five-and-twenty. Nothing strikes the European landing in a tropical country so much as the little spot of cultivated land round a hut, which shelters a very numerous Indian family. Not till long after did man learn to know and cultivate the gifts of Ceres. It must, in fact, surprise us, at present, to see that but a few species of a single family of plants furnish the principal food of the greater proportion of mankind, namely, the so-called corn-plants, or _Cerealia_, of the family of grasses. This family includes nearly 4,000 species, and yet not twenty of them are cultivated for the food of man. In their real nature these cultivated grasses are all summer plants, but varieties have been obtained from some of the most important of them, which, in the proper climate, sown in autumn, germinate and pass the winter under the warm covering of snow, so that they are in a condition to shoot out strongly in the spring, while the soil is being prepared for the other summer plants.