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Of all plants which are the produce of the "glowing Orient," none are superior in interest to the Plantain and Banana, two nearly allied species of Musa, the illustration of one of which (Musa paradisiaca) stands at the head of this paper. Whether the generic name was derived from Musa, the physician of Augustus, or from the Arabic muza, which signifies "taste," is scarcely of sufficient importance to occupy us in its discussion.

Of the several species of Plantain, or Musa, the present has received the name of paradisiaca under the supposition that it was the "tree of life," or the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." St. Pierre observes that the violet cone at the end of a branch of plantains, with the stigmas peering through like gleaming eyes, might well have suggested to the guilty imagination of Eve, the semblance of a serpent, tempting her to pluck the forbidden fruit it bore, as an erect and golden crest.

Though some of the species reach between twenty and thirty feet in height, they are only herbaceous plants, growing up, flowering, fruiting, and then dying away to give place to other shoots proceeding from the parent root. Of true stem there is none; what appears to be a stem is only formed by the overlapping and embracing sheaths of the leafstalks, up the centre of which each new leaf proceeds directly from the root-stock. There is hardly a cottage in India that has not its grove of plantains; the natives almost live upon them, and they are regarded as emblems of plenty and fertility. Dried plantains (that is to say the fruit) form an article of internal commerce, and, in a few instances, have been exported. In our opinion, they are preferable to figs as a dried dessert fruit, but hitherto are scarcely known in England. When deprived of