allow the same vegetables to be there cultivated with which the plains of the Milanese are adorned. In the equinoxial region of Peru or Mexico, rye and especially wheat attain to no maturity in plains of 3500 or 4000 metres of elevation though the mean heat of these alpine regions exceeds that of the parts of Norway and Siberia, in which cerealia are successfully cultivated. But for about 30 days the obliquity of the sphere and the short duration of the nights render the summer heats very considerable in the countries in the vicinity of the polet, while under the tropics or the table-land of the Cordilleras the thermometer never remains a whole day above ten or twelve centigrade degrees.

To avoid mixing ideas of a theoretical nature and hardly susceptible of rigorous accuracy with facts, the certainty of which has been ascertained, we shall neither divide the cultivated plants in New Spain according to the height of the soil in which they vegetate most abundantly, nor according to the degrees of mean temperature which they appear to require for their develope ment: but we shall arrange them in the order of their utility to society. We shall begin with the

11,482 and 13,123 feet. Trans.

+At Umea in Westro-Botnia (latitude 63° 49') the extremes of the centigrade thermometer were, in 1801, in summer + 35°, in winter -45°,7. M. Acerbi complains much of the great summer heats in the most northern part of Lapland.

vegetables which form the principal support of the Mexican people; we shall afterwards treat of the cultivation of the plants which afford ma terials to manufacturing industry; and we shall conclude with a description of the vegetable productions which are the subject of an important commerce with the mother-country.

The banana is for all the inhabitants of the torrid zone what the cereal gramina, wheat, barley, and rye, are for Western Asia and for Europe, and what the numerous varieties of rice are for the countries beyond the Indus, especially for Bengal and China. In the two continents, in the islands throughout the immense extent of the equinoxial seas, wherever the mean heat of the year exceeds twenty-four centigrade degrees, the fruit of the banana is one of the most interesting objects of cultivation for the subsistence of man. The celebrated traveller George Forster, and other naturalists after him, pretended that this valuable plant did not exist in America before the arrival of the Spaniards, but that it was imported from the Canary Islands in the beginning of the 16th century. In fact, Oviedo, who, in his Natural History of the Indies, very carefully distinguishes the indigenous vegetables from those which were introduced there, positively says that the first bananas were planted in 1516 in the island of St. Domingo, *75° of Fahrenheit. Trans.

by Thomas de Berlangas, a monk of the order of preaching friars *. He affirms that he himself saw the musa cultivated in Spain, near the town of Armeria, in Grenada, and in the convent of Franciscans at the island of la Gran Canaria, where Berlangas procured suckers, which were transported to Hispaniola, and from thence successively to the other islands and to the continent. In support of M. Forster's opinion it may also be stated, that in the first accounts of the voyages of Columbus, Alonzo Negro, Penzon, Vespucci†, and Cortez, there is frequent mention of maize, the papayer, the jatropha manihot, and the agave, but never of the banana. However, the silence of these first travellers only proves the little attention which they paid to the natural productions of the American soil. Hernandez, who, besides medical plants, describes a great number of other Mexican vegetables, makes no mention of the musa. Now this botanist lived half a century after Oviedo, and those who consider the musa as foreign to the new continent cannot doubt that its cultivation was general in Mexico towards the

* De plantis esculentis commentatio botanica, 1786, p. 28. Histoire naturelle et generale des Isles et terre ferme de la grande mer oceane, 1556, p. 112-114.

+ Christophori Columbi navigatio. De gentibus ab Alonzo répertis. De navigatione Pinzoni socij admirantis. Navigatio Alberici Vesputij. See Grynæi orbis nov. editio, 1555, p. 64, 84, 85, 87, 211.

end of the 16th ceutury, at an epoqua when a crowd of vegetables of less utility to man had already been carried there from Spain, the Canary Islands, and Peru. The silence of authors is not a sufficient proof in favour of M. Forster's opinion.

It is, perhaps, with the true country of the ba nanas as with that of the pear and cherry trees. The prunus avium, for example, is indigenous in Germany and France, and has existed from the most remote antiquity in our forests, like the robur and the linden tree; while other species of cherry trees which are considered as varieties become permanent, and of which the fruits are more savoury than the prunus avium, have come to us through the Romans from Asia Minor*, and particularly from the kingdom of Pontus. In the same manner, under the name of banana, a great number of plants, which differ essentially in the form of their fruits, and which, perhaps, constitute true species, are cultivated in the equinoxial regions, and even to the parallel of 33 or 34 degrees. If it is an opinion not yet proved, that all the pear trees which are cultivated descend from the wild pear tree as a common stock, we are still more entitled to doubt whether the great number

* Desfontaines, Histoire des arbres et arbrisseaux qui peuvent etre cultivées sur le sol de la France, 1809, t. II. p. 208, a work which contains very learned and curious researches with respect to the country of useful vegetables, and the epoqua of their first cultivation in Europe.

of constant varieties of the banana descend from the musa troglodytarum, cultivated in the Molucca Islands, which itself, according to Gaert. ner, is not perhaps a musa, but a species of the genus ravenala of Adanson.

The musae, or pisangs, described by Rumphius and Rheede, are not all known in the Spanish colonies. Three species, however, are there distinguished, still very imperfectly determined by botanists, the true platano or arton (musa paradisiaca Lin?); the camburi (M. Sapientum Lin?); and the dominico (M. regia Rumph?). I have seen a fourth species of very exquisite taste cultivated in Peru, the meiya of the South Sea, which is called in the market of Lima the platano de taiti, because the first roots of it were brought in the frigate Aguila from the island of Otaheite. Now it is a constant tradition in Mexico and all the continent of South America, that the platano arton and the dominico were cultivated there long before the arrival of the Spaniards, but that the guineo, a variety of the camburi, as its name proves, came from the coast of Africa. The author, who has most carefully marked the dif ferent epoquas at which American agriculture was enriched with foreign productions, the Peruvian Garcilasso de la Vega* expressly says,

* Comentarios Reales de los Incas, Vol. I. p. 282. The small musky banana, the dominic, the fruit of which appeared to