48 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



remarkable manner. It is he who published the first 

 good description and illustration of the potato, under the 

 significant name of Papas Periianoriiin. From what he 

 says, the species has little changed under the culture 

 of nearly three centuries, for it yielded in the beginning 

 as many as fifty tubers of unequal size, from one to 

 two inches long, irregularly ovoid, reddish, ripening in 

 November (at Vienna). The flower was more or less 

 pink externally, and reddish within, with five longi- 

 tudinal stripes of green, as is often seen now. No doubt 

 numerous varieties have been obtained, but the original 

 form has not been lost. De I'Ecluse compares the scent 

 of the flovv'er with that of the lime, the only difierence 

 from our modern plant. He sowed seeds which produced 

 a white-flowered variety, such as we sometimes see now. 

 The plants described by de I'Ecluse were sent to him 

 in 1588, by Philippe de Sivr}^ Seigneur of Waldheim and 

 Governor of Mons, who had received them from some 

 one in attendance on the papal legate in Belgium. De 

 I'Ecluse adds that the .species had been introduced into 

 Italy from Spain or America {cevtwni est vet ex Hispania, 

 eel ex Araericaj hahuisse), and he wonders that, although 

 the plant had become so common in Italy that it was 

 eaten like a turnip and given to the pigs, the learned 

 men of the University of Padua only became acquainted 

 with it by means of the tuber which he sent them from 

 Germany. Targioni ^ has not been able to discover any 

 proof that the potato was as widely cultivated in Italy 

 at the end of the sixteenth century as de I'Ecluse 

 asserts, but he quotes Father Magazzini of Vallombrosa, 

 whose posthumous work, published in 1623, mentions the 

 species as one previously brought, without naming the 

 date, from Spain or Portugal by barefooted friars. It 

 Avas, therefore, towards the end of the sixteenth oi" at the 

 beginning of the seventeenth century that the cultivation 

 of the potato became known in Tuscany. Independently 

 of what de I'Ecluse and the agriculturist of Vallombrosa 



^ Targioni-Tozzetti, Lezzioni, ii. p. 10 ; Cenni Storici sulV Introduzione 

 di Varie Piante nelV Agricoltura di Toscana, 1 voL in Svo, Florence, 1853, 

 p. 37. 



