UNNBAN SOCIETY OF LONDON, 2$ 



leani that the potato is entitled to that qualified couimeudation 

 which a soldier-kiug is said to have bestowed ou his army ration ; 

 it has taken Britain more than another century to re:ilize that 

 her fate may depend upon the propagation of this tuber. We do 

 not hear tliat any such dilliculties attended tlie cultivation of 

 wheat in the valley of the Nile. But there is another difference 

 between the tales. The myth of Osiris and wheat has come true ; 

 in Gilead, where Osiris found it, a wlieat grows wild still. The 

 story of Ealeigh and the potato is hardly so fortunate ; the potato 

 is not wild in Virginia, whence Ealeigh is thought to have 

 brought it. 



We do not, on this account, ti'eat as a fable the tale which 

 links the name of Raleigh with a familiar and important vegetable. 

 But no more are we entitled to do this as regards the legend 

 whicli associates Osiris with wheat. If tradition, as compared 

 witli history, pay less attention to formal consistency, she has the 

 advantage of being able to preserve the atmosphere in which her 

 incidents occur. History has her own perplexities ; her efforts to 

 reconcile authorities at times involve her facts in obscurity. 



This fate, as those who try to trace the liistory of cultivated 

 plants are well aware, is one to which facts connected with 

 acclimatization are singularly liable. An instance familiar to our 

 fathers affords an illustration. 



That undertaking involved, like the action of Osiris, the subjec- 

 tion to husbandry of a plant previously wild; like that of Ealeigh, 

 the transfer of a useful species from the new world to the old. 

 Although in its beneficial consequences the enterprise of last 

 generation be comparable with these older ones, there was a time, 

 less than three centuries ago, when its accomplishment by this 

 country had been unthinkable. If the first heat of the great 

 ecclesiastical revolution in northern Europe had died down before 

 the fame of a Peruvian remedy for malaria reached our hemi- 

 sphere, enough of its glow survived to prevent the ague-stricken 

 Protestant from endangering his spiritual health by using a specific 

 so sinister as ' Jesuits' bark.' A century had to elapse before au 

 accomplished English naturalist could allay a prejudice that 

 appears singular to-day. Another century passed before a saner 

 public spirit and an enlightened solicitude for the welfare of man- 

 kind sanctioned the proposal to introduce the trees whicli yield 

 that bark to India. The enthusiasm of a far-seeing traveller 

 carried the project to a successful issue, and just as popular 

 belief has linked the name of an Elizabetlian voyager with the 

 potato, so will history associate the name of a Victorian one with 

 Cinchona. 



But great events of natural history are as much the sport of 

 fortune as those of her civil sister. The dictates of medical 

 fashion have made it more economic to cultivate, where this can 

 be done, one especial kind of Cinchona. Should that fashion 

 persist the cultivation of other kinds may cease. This particular 

 kind chances to be one that was iiidependently introduced. But 



