But Professor Kuntze pays especial attention to the banana, or plantain.
The banana is seedless. It is found throughout tropical Asia and Africa.
Professor Kuntze asks, "In what way was this plant, which cannot stand a
voyage through the temperate zone, carried to America?" And yet it was
generally cultivated in America before 1492. Says Professor Kuntze, "It
must be remembered that the plantain is a tree-like, herbaceous plant,
possessing no easily transportable bulbs, like the potato or the dahlia,
nor propagable by cuttings, like the willow or the poplar. It has only a
perennial root, which, once planted, needs hardly any care, and yet
produces the most abundant crop of any known tropical plant." He then
proceeds to discuss how it could have passed from Asia to America. He
admits that the roots must have been transported from one country to the
other by civilized man. He argues that it could not have crossed the
Pacific from Asia to America, because the Pacific is nearly thrice or
four times as wide as the Atlantic. The only way he can account for the
plantain reaching America is to suppose that it was carried there when
the North Pole had a tropical climate! Is there any proof that civilized
man existed at the North Pole when it possessed the climate of Africa?

Is it not more reasonable to suppose that the plantain, or banana, was
cultivated by the people of Atlantis, and carried by their civilized
agricultural colonies to the east and the west? Do we not find a
confirmation of this view in the fact alluded to by Professor Kuntze in
these words: "A cultivated plant which does not possess seeds must have
been under culture for a very long period--we have not in Europe a
single exclusively seedless, berry-bearing, cultivated plant--and hence
it is perhaps fair to infer that these plants were cultivated as early
as the beginning of the middle of the Diluvial Period."