The banana, however, has very long resisted the inevitable tendency to
degeneration in plants thus artificially and unhealthily propagated.
Potatoes have only been in cultivation for a few hundred years; and yet
the potato constitution has become so far enfeebled by the practice of
growing from the tuber that the plants now fall an easy prey to potato
fungus, Colorado beetles, and a thousand other persistent enemies. It is
just the same with the vine--propagated too long by layers or cuttings,
its health has failed entirely, and it can no longer resist the ravages
of the phylloxera or the slow attacks of the vine-disease fungus. But
the banana, though of very ancient and positively immemorial antiquity
as a cultivated plant, seems somehow gifted with an extraordinary power
of holding its own in spite of long-continued unnatural propagation. For
thousands of years it has been grown in Asia in the seedless condition,
and yet it springs as heartily as ever still from the underground
suckers. Nevertheless, there must in the end be some natural limit to
this wonderful power of reproduction, or rather of longevity; for, in
the strictest sense, the banana bushes that now grow in the negro
gardens of Trinidad and Demerara are part and parcel of the very same
plants which grew and bore fruit a thousand years ago in the native
compounds of the Malay Archipelago.
In fact, I think there can be but little doubt that the banana is the
very oldest product of human tillage.
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