The plantains alone ought, according to Humboldt, to give one hundred and thirty-three times as much food as the same space of ground sown with wheat, and forty-four times as much as if it grew potatoes.

True, the plantain is by no means as nourishing as wheat: which reduces the actual difference between their value per acre to twenty-five to one.

But under his plantains he can grow other vegetables.

He has no winter, and therefore some crop or other is always coming forward.

From whence it comes, that, as I just hinted, his wife and children seem to have always something to eat in their mouths, if it be only the berries and nuts which abound in every hedge and wood.