As for the plant on which they grow, no mere words can picture the simple grandeur and grace of a form which startles me whenever I look steadily at it.

For however common it is--none commoner here--it is so unlike aught else, so perfect in itself, that, like a palm, it might well have become, in early ages, an object of worship.
And who knows that it has not?
Who knows that there have not been races who looked on it as the Red Indians looked on Mondamin, the maize-plant; as a gift of a god--perhaps the incarnation of a god?
Who knows?
Whence did the ancestors of that plant come?
What was its wild stock like ages ago?
It is wild nowhere now on earth.

It stands alone and unique in the vegetable kingdom, with distant cousins, but no brother kinds.

It has been cultivated so long that though it flowers and fruits, it seldom or never seeds, and is propagated entirely by cuttings.

The only spot, as far as I am aware, in which it seeds regularly and plentifully, is the remote, and till of late barbarous Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.