Amongst our English vegetables, the potato is the most abundant and useful. It is liked by nearly all, and it is indeed a chief article of food in some districts. Other vegetables are largely eaten—cabbages and turnips, for instance—but the potato is in the greatest demand.

We have in the potato an illustration of a plant which belongs to a poisonous family, but has roots (or tubers) very nourishing and agreeable to eat. But if anybody was to eat the berries which follow the showy flowers of the potato, they would most likely be made ill, nor are the leaves wholesome to us, though they furnish food to the big caterpillar of the Death's-head moth.

We have to thank the Romans for bringing into Britain many fruits and vegetables; others, later on, came from France and Germany, or some other part of Europe; but the potato we owe to America. The potato first known in these islands, however, was not the one familiar now; it was the sweet potato, or Batatus, cultivated by the Spanish and Portuguese; it is supposed to have been brought over from the Continent early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It was a vegetable much liked by those who could get it, and this is the potato of which one of Shakespeare's characters says, 'Let it rain potatoes and hail kissing comforts.'

No one can tell positively who, of the voyagers to America, towards the end of the sixteenth century, it was who came upon the true potato and brought it back to his own country, more as a curious plant than for any other reason. Some have given the credit to the great Sir Walter Raleigh, but it seems more likely that he himself was not the discoverer, but one of his followers, named Heriot. In a book Heriot wrote he exactly describes the potato amongst his finds, calling it 'open-awk,' a name he had heard in America. 'There are roundish roots,' he says, 'some the size of a walnut, some much bigger; these hang together on the other roots, and are good either boiled or roasted.' By roasting he no doubt meant putting them in the hot ashes of a fire. The question of how potatoes should be cooked seems to have been troublesome at first. People dipped them in hot water, and then complained that they were hard, or sticky like glue. Potatoes brought to the table of King James I. are said to have cost two shillings a pound, and for a long while the vegetable remained scarce, perhaps because people did not know the best way to raise a crop as we do now, by planting slices of the tubers. Several of the old books only refer to it as an ornamental garden plant.

Sir Walter Raleigh does appear to have introduced this vegetable into Ireland, at least. Going one spring to his estate at Youghal, Cork, he took some potatoes, and gave them to his gardener, who planted them. Fine specimens had grown up in August, but the gardener did not think the berries were of any good, and told Sir Walter he did not admire the wonderful American plant. 'Then pull it up and throw it away,' said Sir Walter; but when the man saw the potatoes on the roots, he thought differently.

The first place in England where the potato was grown in fields was North Meols, Lancashire, about 1694. For many years the Scotch only grew it as a curiosity, till Thomas Prentice, of Kilsyth, stocked his garden with potatoes in 1728, and distributed them amongst the villages near. Early in the reign of Queen Victoria, it had become abundant, especially in Ireland; but the potato disease or murrain caused great distress in 1845 and later, nor has it ever been got rid of entirely. The potato has been introduced to our Indian Empire, and though it was unpopular at first, the people have since become partial to it.

J. R. S. C.