‘ 
hl ae aa” de ee ere Te 
ee 
363 
severity of the winters. When the great frost broke out in 
the November of 1739, and which increased in intensity du- 
ring the following month, all the potato crop not already 
used was in the ground, either undug, or in pits with such 
a loose covering of earth as was penetrable to the frost. It was 
said that the potato crop was destroyed in one night; and 
that 300,000 people perished of famine resulting therefrom. 
In 1741 the people were cautioned against eating potatoes, 
which were believed to be diseased, and likely to produce 
disease in man.* 
«The following list of failures in the potato shows how 
little reliance can be placed on that esculent as the sole food 
of a nation :— 
«©1765. A series of unusual wet seasons preceded this year, 
which was memorable for the quantity of rain which fell in the 
early part of it, and the excessive drought of summer ; pota- 
toes failed; they were scarce and small; as occurred again, 
under like circumstances, in 1826. 
* Since the foregoing was read to the Academy, I have received the fol- 
lowing note from Mr. Curry on the subject :— 
«¢ During my residence in London, in the summer of last year (1855), I fell 
in with a curious Irish poem of several stanzas, in the handwriting of the 
author, John O’Neachtan, an Irish scholar, well known in and about Dublin, 
between 1710 and 1750. 
“ The poem gives a vivid and most graphic description of a battle sup- 
posed to have been fought at Cross-bride, somewhere about Tallaght, in the 
county of Dublin, in the year 1740, between the farmer advocates of the 
potato, which had been nearly annihilated in the preceding year by the great 
frost, and the market gardeners and others, who gloried in the destruction 
of the foreign root, and gave a disinterested preference to the growth of the 
less prolific and more inaccessible edibles of barley, beans, peas, rye, cab- 
bage, &c. 
“The part of this description which may prove of interest to you is that 
in which the writer always speaks of the potato as the white Spaniard, Spain- 
each Geal, thatis, the white or generous-hearted Spaniard; and where he says 
that they gladdened the people’s hearts from the first day of August till 
‘Patrick’s day.” 
