the plantain-tree: A genus of the monocota order, belonging to the polyandria clas of plants; and in the natural method ranking under the eighth order, Scitamineae. The calyx of the male hermaphrodite is a spathe or sheath; the corolla is dipetalous; the one petal erect and quinquidentate; the other netiferaceous, concave, and shorter; there are six filaments; five of which are perfect; one sterile; the germen inferior and abortive. The female hermaphrodite has the calyx, corolla, filaments, and pistil of the male hermaphrodite, with only one filament perfect; the berry is oblong, and three-angled below. The most remarkable species are, 1. The paradisiaca, or plantain; 2. The musa sapientum, or banana-tree. See Plate CCCXX.

The first sort is cultivated in all the islands of the West Indies, where the fruit serves the Indians for bread; and some of the white people also prefer it to most other things, especially to the yams and callada bread. The plant rises with a soft stalk 15 or 20 feet high; the lower part of the stalk is often as large as a man's thigh, diminishing gradually to the top, where the leaves come out on every side; these are often eight feet long, and from two to three feet broad, with a strong fleshy midrib, and a great number of transverse veins running from the midrib to the borders. The leaves are thin and tender, so that where they are exposed to the open air, they are generally torn by the wind; for as they are large, the wind has great power against them; these leaves come out from the centre of the stalk, and are rolled up at their first appearance; but when they are advanced above the stalk, they expand and turn backward. As these leaves come up rolled in the manner before-mentioned, their advance upward is so quick that their growth may almost be discerned by the naked eye; and if a fine line is drawn across level with the top of the leaf, in an hour's time the leaf will be near an inch above it. When the plant is grown to its full height, the spikes of flowers will appear in the centre, which is often near four feet in length, and nods on one side. The flowers come out in bunches; those in the lower part of the spike being the largest; the others diminish in their size upward. Each of these bunches is covered with a spathe or sheath of a fine purple colour, which drops off when the flowers open. The upper part of the spike is made up of male or barren flowers, which are not succeeded by fruit, but fall off with their covers. The fruit or plantains are about a foot long, and an inch and a half or two inches diameter: it is at first green, but when ripe of a pale-yellow colour. The skin is tough; and within is a soft pulp of a luscious sweet flavour. The pikes of fruit are often so large as to weigh upwards of 40lbs. The fruit of this sort is generally cut before it is ripe. The green skin is pulled off, and the heart is roasted in a clear fire for a few minutes, and frequently turned; it is then scraped, and served up as bread. Boiled plantains are not so palatable. This tree is cultivated on a very extensive scale in Jamaica; without the fruit of which, Dr Wright says, the island would scarce be habitable, as no species of provision could supply their place. Even flour or bread itself would be less agreeable, and less able to support the laborious negro, so as to enable him to do his business or to keep in health. Plantains also fatten horses, cattle, swine, dogs, fowls, and other domestic animals.

The leaves being smooth and soft are employed as dressings after blisters. The water from the soft trunk is astringent, and employed by some to check diarrhoeas. Every other part of the tree is useful in different parts of rural economy. The leaves are used for napkins and table-cloths, and are food for hogs.

The second sort differs from the first, in having its stalks marked with dark purple stripes and spots. The fruit is shorter, straighter, and rounder; the pulp is softer, and of a more luscious taste. It is never eaten green; but when ripe, it is very agreeable, either eaten raw or fried in slices as fritters; and is relished by all ranks of people in the West Indies.

Both the above plants were carried to the West Indies from the Canary Islands; whither, it is believed, they had been brought from Guinea, where they grow naturally. They are also cultivated in Egypt, and in most other hot countries, where they grow to perfection in about 10 months from their first planting to the ripening of their fruit. When their stalks are cut down, there will several suckers come up from the root, which in six or eight months will produce fruit; so that by cutting down the stalks at different times, there is a constant succession of fruit all the year.

In Europe there are some of these plants preserved in the gardens of curious persons, who have hot-houses capacious enough for their reception, in many of whom they have ripened their fruit very well; but as they grow very tall, and their leaves are large, they require more room in the house than most people care to allow them. They are propagated by suckers, which come from the roots of those plants which have fruited; and many times the younger plants, when they are stinted in growth, will also put out suckers.

The fruit of the banana-tree is four or five inches long, of the size and shape of a middling cucumber, and of a high, grateful flavour: the leaves are two yards long, and a foot broad in the middle; they join to the top of the body of the tree, and frequently contain in their cavities a great quantity of water, which runs out, upon a small incision being made into the tree, at the junction of the leaves. Bananas grow in great bunches, that weigh a dozen pounds and upwards. The body of the tree is so porous as not to merit the name of wood; the tree is only perennial by its roots, and dies down to the ground every autumn.

When the natives of the West Indies (says Labat) undertake a voyage, they make provision of a paste of banana; which, in case of need, serves them for nourishment and drink: for this purpose they take ripe bananas; and having squeezed them through a fine sieve, form the solid fruit into small loaves, which are dried in the sun or in hot ashes, after being previously wrapped up in the leaves of Indian flowering-reed.—When they would make use of this paste they dissolve it in water, which is very easily done; and the liquor, thereby rendered thick, has an agreeable acid taste imparted to it, which makes it both refreshing and nourishing.—The banana is greatly esteemed, and even venerated, by the natives of Madeira, who term it the forbidden fruit, and reckon it a crime almost inexpiable to cut it with a knife; because, after dissection, it exhibits, as they pretend, a similitude of our Saviour's crucifixion; and to cut the fruit open with a knife, is, in their apprehension, to wound his sacred image.

Some authors have imagined, that the banana-tree was that of the leaves of which our first parents made themselves aprons in Paradise. The Sacred text, indeed, calls the leaves employed for that purpose fig-leaves; and Milton, in a most beautiful but erroneous description, affirms the bearded or Bengal fig to have been the tree alluded to. But besides that the fruit of the banana is often by the most ancient authors called called a fig, its leaves, by reason of their great size and solidity, were much more proper for a veil or covering than those of the Bengal fig, which are seldom above six or eight inches long and three broad. On the other hand, the banana leaves being three, four, and five feet long, and proportionably broad, could not fail to be pitched upon in preference to all others; especially as they might be easily joined, or sewed together, with the numerous thread-like filaments that may, with the utmost facility, be peeled from the body of this tree.

Some have supposed the Abyssinian plant enfete to be a species of musa. It is said to be a native of the province of Narea, where it grows in the great marshes and swamps for which that province is remarkable, owing to the many rivers which originate in that country, and have but a small declivity to the ocean. This plant, as well as the coffee-tree, is said to have been unknown in Abyssinia before the arrival of the Galla, who imported them both along with them. It comes to great perfection about Gondar; but the principal plantations of it are in that part of Maitsha and Gouth, to the west of the Nile, where it is almost the sole food of the Galla who inhabit that country. Maitsha is almost entirely on a dead level; so that the rains stagnate and prevent the sowing of grain. Were it not for the enfete, therefore, the Galla would have scarce any vegetable food. Mr Bruce * thinks that the enfete may have been cultivated in some of the gardens of Egypt about Rosetta, but that it was not a native of the country. He strongly controverts the opinion that this plant is a species of musa. "It is true (says he), the leaf of the banana resembles that of the enfete; it bears figs, and has an excrescence from its trunk, which is terminated by a conical figure, chiefly differing from the enfete in size and quantity of parts; but the figs of the banana are of the size and figure of a cucumber, and this is the part which is eaten. This fig is sweet, though mealy, and of a taste highly agreeable. It is supposed to have no seeds, though in fact there are four small black seeds belonging to every fig. But the figs of the enfete are not eatable: they are of a soft tender substance; watery, tailless, and in colour and consistence resembling a rotten apricot: they are of a conical form, crooked a little at the lower end; about an inch and an half in length, and an inch in breadth where thickest. In the inside of these is a large stone half an inch long, of the shape of a bean or cashew-nut, of a dark-brown colour; and this contains a small seed, which is seldom hardened into fruit, but consists only of skin. The long stalk that bears the figs of the enfete springs from the centre of the plant, or rather is the body or solid part of the plant itself. Upon this, where it begins to bend, are a parcel of loose leaves; then grows the fig upon the body of the plant without any stalk; after which the top of the stalk is thickened with small leaves, in the midst of which it terminates the flower in the form of an artichoke; whereas in the banana, the flower in form of the artichoke grows at the end of that shoot or stalk, which proceeds from the middle of the plant, the upper part of which bears the row of figs. The leaves of the enfete are of a web of longitudinal fibres closely set together; the leaves grow from the bottom without stalks; whereas the banana is in form like a tree, and has been mistaken for such. One half of it is divided into a stem, the other is a head formed with leaves; and in place of the stem that grows out of the enfete, a number of leaves, rolled round together like a truncheon, shoots out of the heart of the banana, and renews the upper as the under leaves fall off: but all the leaves of the banana have a long stalk; this fixes them to the trunk, which they do not embrace by a broad base or involucrem as the enfete does.

"But the greatest differences are still remaining—The banana has by some been mistaken for a tree of the palmaceous kind, for no other reason but a kind of familiarity in producing the fruit on an excrescence or stalk growing from the heart of the stem: but still the musa is neither woody nor perennial; it bears the fruit but once; and in all these respects it differs from trees of the palmaceous kind, and indeed from all sort of trees whatever. The enfete, on the contrary, has no naked stem; no part of it is woody: the body of it, for several feet high, is succulent; but no part of the banana plant can be eaten. As soon as the stalk of the enfete appears perfect and full of leaves, the body of the plant turns hard and fibrous, and is no longer fit to be eaten: before, it is the best of all vegetables. When boiled, it has the taste of the best new wheat-bread not perfectly baked. When you make use of the enfete for eating, you cut it immediately above the small detached roots, and perhaps a foot or two higher, as the plant is of age. The green must be stripped from the upper part till it becomes white; when soft, like a turnip well boiled, if eat with milk or butter, it is the best of all food, wholesome, nourishing, and easily digested."

Our author now proceeds to consider an hieroglyphic sometimes met with in Egypt, viz. "the figure of Isis sitting between some branches of the banana tree, as is supposed, and some handfuls of ears of wheat. You see likewise the hippopotamus ravaging a quantity of the banana tree. Yet the banana is merely adventitious in Egypt: it is a native of Syria: it does not even exist in the low hot country of Arabia Felix; but chooses some elevation in the mountains where the air is temperate; and is not found in Syria farther to the southward than Lat. 34°.

For these reasons Mr Bruce thinks, that the banana not being a plant of the country, "could never have entered into the list of their hieroglyphics; for this reason it could not figure anything regular or permanent in the history of Egypt or its climate. I therefore imagine (adds he), that this hieroglyphic was wholly Ethiopian; and that the supposed banana, which, as an adventitious plant, signified nothing in Egypt, was only a representation of the enfete; and that the record in the hieroglyphic of Isis and the enfete-tree was something that happened between herself, which was about August, and the time that the enfete-tree came into use, which was in October.—The hippopotamus is generally thought to represent a Nile that has been so abundant as to be destructive. When, therefore, we see upon the obelisks the hippopotamus destroying the banana, we may suppose it meant, that the extraordinary inundation had gone so far as not only to destroy the wheat, but also to retard or hurt the growth of the enfete, which was to supply its place." Musæus, an ancient Greek poet, was, according to Plato and Diodorus Siculus, an Athenian, the son of Orpheus, and chief of the Eleusinian mysteries instituted at Athens in honour of Ceres: or, according to others, he was only the disciple of Orpheus; but from the great resemblance which there was between his character and talents and those of his master, by giving a stronger outline to the figure he was called his son, as those were styled the children of Apollo who cultivated the arts of which he was the tutelar god.

Musæus is allowed to have been one of the first poets who verified the oracles. He is placed in the Arundelian marbles, epoch 15, 1426 B.C., at which time his hymns are said to have been received in the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries. Lactantius tells us, that Musæus not only composed a theogony, but formed a sphere for the use of his companions; yet as this honour is generally given to Chiron, it is more natural to suppose, with Sir Isaac Newton, that he enlarged it with the addition of several constellations after the conquest of the golden fleece. The sphere itself shows that it was delineated after the Argonautic expedition, which is described in the aftertims, together with several other more ancient histories of the Greeks, and without any thing later; for the ship Argo was the first long vessel which they had built: hitherto they had used round ships of burthen, and kept within sight of the shore; but now, by the dictates of the oracle, and consent of the princes of Greece, the flower of that country sail rapidly through the deep, and guide their ship by the stars.

Musæus is celebrated by Virgil in the character of hierophant, or priest of Ceres, at the head of the most illustrious mortals who have merited a place in Elysium. Here he is made the conductor of Æneas to the recess where he meets the shade of his father Anchises.

A hill near the citadel of Athens was called Musæum, according to Pausanias, from Musæus, who used to retire thither to meditate and compose his religious hymns; at which place he was afterwards buried. The works which went under his name, like those of Orpheus, were by many attributed to Onomaecritus. Nothing remains of this poet now, nor were any of his writings extant in the time of Pausanias, except a hymn to Ceres, which he made for the Lyceomides. And as these hymns were likewise set to music, and sung in the mysteries by Musæus himself in the character of priest, he thence perhaps acquired from future times the title of musician as well as poet; the performance of sacred music being probably at first confined to the priesthood in these celebrations, as it had been before in Egypt, whence they originated. However, he is not enumerated among ancient musicians by Plutarch; nor does it appear that he merited the title of son and successor to Orpheus for his mythical abilities, so much as for his poetry, piety, and profound knowledge in religious mysteries.