The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom / Considered in Their Various Uses to Man and in Their Relation to the Arts and Manufactures; Forming a Practical Treatise & Handbook of Reference for the Colonist, Manufacturer, Merchant, and Consumer, on the Cultivation, Preparation for Shipment, and Commercial Value, &c. of the Various Substances Obtained From Trees and Plants, Entering into the Husbandry of Tropical and Sub-tropical Regions, &c.

by P. L. Simmonds

Artocarpus incisa.—This tree is less cultivated than would be supposed from its useful properties. In the West Indies and the Indian Islands, where it has been introduced from its native place, the South Sea Islands, it is held in very little consideration, the graminea, tuberous roots, and farinaceous plants being more easily and readily cultivated. There are two or three varieties known in the Asiatic regions. The properties of this tree are thus enumerated by Hooker:—The fruit serves for food; clothes are made from the fibres of the inner bark; the wood is used for building houses and making boats; the male catkins are employed as tinder; the leaves for table cloths and for wrapping provisions in; and the viscid milky juice affords birdlime.

A. integrifoliais the Jack or Jacca, the fruit of which attains a large size, sometimes weighing 30 lbs., but is inferior in quality to the bread-fruit.

The nuts or fruit of Brosimum Alicastrum, an evergreen shrub, native of Jamaica, are nutritious and agreeable articles of food. When boiled with salt fish, pork or beef, they have frequently been the support of the negroes and poorer sorts of white people in times of scarcity, and proved a wholesome and not unpleasant food; when roasted it eats something like our common chesnut, and is called bread-nut.

Kafir Bread.—According to Thunberg, the Hottentots being very little acquainted with agriculture, or with the use of the cerealia, and subsisting principally upon wild bulbs and fruits, obtain food also from Encephalartos caffer, a species of Zamia, with a cylindrical trunk, the thickness of a man's body, and about seven feet high. Having cut down a tree, they took out the pith, that nearly fills its trunk, and which abounds in mucilage and an amylaceous fluid; after keeping this for some time buried under ground in the skin of an animal, they reduced it by pounding and kneading into a kind of paste; and then baked it in hot ashes, in the form of round cakes, nearly an inch thick. The Dutch colonists, in consequence of this practice of the natives, called the plant brood-boon, which signifies literally bread tree.

THE PLANTAIN AND BANANA.

The several varieties of the edible plantain which are known and cultivated throughout the West Indies, Africa, and in the East are all reducible to two classes, viz., the Plantain and the Banana (Musa Paradisiacaand sapientum). The difference between these two plants is even so slight as to be scarcely specific; it is therefore most probable that there was originally but one stock, from which they have, by cultivation and change of locality, been derived.

The tiger plantain (M. maculata) and the black ditto (M. sylvestris) are cultivated in Jamaica. The whole of the species and varieties of the tribe are what are called polygamous monœcious plants, each individual tree bearing the male and female organs of reproduction.

The plantain and its varieties invariably bear male, female and hermaphrodite flowers within the same spathe, all of them being imperfect and consequently unproductive of seed. An individual may, even from excess of culture, moisture, &c., be entirely incapable of flowering. During the prevalence of a disease or blight among the plantain walks of Demerara in the years 1844 and 1845, it was seriously proposed to introduce male plantains, or obtain fresh stock by seed.

It is, therefore, necessary to determine with exactness, if possible, whether the Plantain or Banana, (whichever be the parent stock) exists anywhere at present, or has been known to have existed as a perfect plant, that is bearing fertile seeds; or, whether it has always existed in the imperfect state, that is, incapable of being procreated by seed, the only state in which it at present exists in our colonies.

Whether Linnæus be right in his conjecture (Spec. Plant, 1763) that the "Bihai" (Heliconia humilis), a native of Caraccas, which produces fertile seeds, is the stock plant of the plantain, it is almost impossible to ascertain; but the absence of any description of a wild seed-bearing plantain, renders it highly probable that the cultivated species are hybrids produced long ago. The banana, from time immemorial, has been the food of the philosophers and sages of the East, and almost all travellers throughout the tropics have described these plants exactly as they are known to us, either as sweet fruit eaten raw, or a farinaceous vegetable roasted or boiled. It is remarkable that the plantain and banana should be indigenous, or at all events cultivated for ages both in the Old and New World. Numerous South American travellers describe some one of these plants as being indigenous articles of food among the natives, thus showing (if the plantain and its varieties be hybrids) a communication between the tropics of America, Asia and Africa, long before the time of Columbus. The older writers on the colony of Guiana, as Hartsinck, Bellin and others, consider the plantain to be a native. It is remarkable that Sir R. Schomburgk, during his travels, found a large species of edible plantain far in the interior. It appears, therefore, from all the investigations that have been made, that the plantain is either a hybrid, or its power of production from seed has been destroyed long ago by cultivation, and that it is not known to exist anywhere in a perfect state; in which case any attempt to improve the present stock by the introduction of suckers from elsewhere, must be totally futile. Mr. A. Garnett recommends the following system of cultivation, as calculated to prevent the blight. The walk or plantation is to be formed into beds 36 feet wide, divided by open drains 30 inches deep. Two rows of plantains to be planted upon each bed at 18 feet distance, both between and along the rows, to afford a clear ventilation to the enlarging plants, and so soon as the plantation has been established, the space of land between each row to be shovel-ploughed 12 inches deep; the same to be repeated annually, and upon the interspace may be planted maize, yams, sugar cane, or eddoes, and the whole kept clear at all times. Thus, with the conjoined principles of good tillage, free ventilation, and mixed crops, the blight may yet be successfully combated.