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Man himself is, and has always been, a great eater of fruit. Not only so, but he has enormously improved and altered wild fruits until they are modified into monsters of the most extraordinary kind. The ordinary wild gooseberry weighs about 5 dwt. But even in the year 1786 some of the cultivated forms weighed double this amount (10 dwt.), and in 1852 gooseberries which weighed more than 37 dwt. were in existence. What size the largest big gooseberry may be this year is not very easy to say, because the public Press is at slack times too energetic about the question. The most usual way of improving fruits is by selecting the finest specimens for reproduction. It is by this means that the original wild banana, which is a rather small fruit with very large seeds and very little flesh, has been altered into something like 150 varieties, of which the immense majority have no seed at all. This is a very extraordinary fact, because the seed is the reason for the existence of the fruit. Of course, all such varieties must be reproduced by suckers (like the banana) or by grafts, or in some such non-sexual manner. Seedless varieties exist of the Cucumber, Fig, German Medlar, Diospyros, and Orange.