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‘Clusius, the botanist of Leyden, who wrote in 1586, says 
the potato was cultivated in Italy prior to that date; and 
Cuvier denied that Europe derived the potato from Virginia. 
The researches of Banks also favour this conclusion, and he 
states that Coccius, in his Chronicle, printed in 1553, mentions 
potatoes under the term of papas. Herriott, who accompanied 
Raleigh’s expedition to Virginia, described them under the 
name of openawk. In Irish they are variously styled potatee, 
pratea, or phottie, mere Hibernicisms of the English word 
‘potato.’ Sir Robert Southwell, President of the Royal Society, 
stated, at one of its meetings in 1693, that potatoes had been 
introduced into Ireland by his grandfather, who first had them 
from Sir W. Raleigh. 
«¢ T would now ask, what had the people to live on in Ireland 
before Raleigh introduced the potato? While most other 
nations have had their history transmitted from the days of the 
hunter and the fisher, clothed in skins, and using weapons 
either for the chase, their own preservation, or the production 
of food, and so rising in the scale of civilization from barbarism 
to the highest amount of cultivation, in which the arts were 
made subservient to the food as well as to the ornament and 
education of man—we find this curious fact, that there is 
no record of such a state of existence in Ireland. The Irish 
had mills and ‘pure white wheat,’ and a coexistent state of civili- 
zation of which that was but a small portion; because, to 
raise and to grind corn, and to bake it into bread, was compa- 
ratively an advanced state of society. We had in Ireland at 
that time a social state very different from that alluded to, as 
being the character of other nations in similar phases of de- 
velopment, and which serves to confirm the idea that we are 
in all probability descended from a colony previously civilized, 
which had settled in this country. 
«The people lived, in early times, upon corn and milk, 
and also upon the flesh of oxen and swine—the latter is shown 
by the details of feasts and royal banquets, descriptions of 
