ST. VINCENT'S ROCKS 75 



1637-40 



On 21 August 1637, when visiting his brother-in-law 

 WilHam Yalden at Sheet, he saw * Batata Hispanorum, 

 or Common Potatoes '. They were the Sweet Potatoes, 

 Ipomaea Batatas, such as could be purchased at the 

 Exchange in London, and were liable to be killed by the 

 first frosts. The tubers ' howsoever they be dressed, they 

 comfort, nourish, and strengthen the body, procuring bodily 

 lust, and that with greedinesse '. 



Goodyer was acquainted with ' Potatoes of Virginia ', 

 but we do not know that he cultivated them himself 



There is no evidence that he ever accompanied Johnson 

 and his ' socii itinerantes ' upon their herborizing excursions, 

 but he certainly took the greatest interest in their dis- 

 coveries and helped them with their reports. He possessed 

 the accounts of their Kentish tours in 1629 and 1632, and 

 added to the list of plants in the former from his own 

 knowledge. His presentation copy of the Mercurius 

 dotauictcs inscribed ' 28 Octob. 1634 — Ex dono Thomae 

 Johnson', containing the account of the tour in Wales in 

 which Stonehouse of Magdalen College also took part, is 

 similarly annotated, and has many plant names picked out 

 by yellow paint marks — a favourite method of his. The 

 Appendix to this work, a treatise on the Waters of Bath 

 (1634), ^s well as the lure of new plants, may have deter- 

 mined him to visit Bath in 1638. 



Johnson (Mercurms, pars altera 1641) is our authority 

 for believing that Goodyer found a new Speedwell on 

 St. Vincent's Rocks near Bristol, and as the statement 

 is left unaltered in Goodyer's own copy of the book we may 

 take it that he did botanize there. 



And nothing is more natural, for the grand and precipi- 

 tous cliffs of St. Vincent's Rocks have always been classic 

 ground to the botanist. Their vegetation is luxuriant : 

 their ledges, crowded with an abundance of good plants 

 in a small area, are comparable only to the similar floral 



