56 THE POTATO 



of any sort in public affairs usually brings to the 

 front some strong man capable of dealing with it, 

 so this crisis in the history of the potato-growing 

 industry in the United Kingdom brought to the 

 front a man who rendered incalculable service to 

 his country and his fellow-men. This was Wil- 

 liam Paterson of Dundee. 



"As a market gardener and potato-seed grower 

 on a large scale Mr. Paterson had been experi- 

 menting for twenty years previously in the raising 

 of new varieties of potatoes; but all the new vari- 

 eties which he had brought out prior to 1846 had 

 gone down before the disease, like all the others in 

 that disastrous year. But the failure of his exer- 

 tions in that way only caused him to redouble his 

 energies, with the fixed determination to discover 

 the means of either preventing the scourge alto- 

 gether or at least of checking its ravages to a 

 material degree. With the zeal of a devotee he 

 set himself to investigate the nature and cause of 

 the disease, while carrying on at the same time his 

 experiments in the way of raising new varieties 

 which should show sufficient constitutional vigor 

 to hold the disease at bay. 



"For several years Mr. Paterson worked on with 

 little success and less encouragement, but at 

 length, in the second half of the '50's, he brought 

 out the Paterson's Victoria, which proved to be 

 not only a splendid cropper of excellent quality, 

 but practically immune against the disease. The 

 success of the Victoria was immediate and out- 

 standing, and very soon it was largely grown all 

 over the country. The late Queen Victoria wrote 

 with her own hand a letter to Mr. Paterson order- 

 ing a quantity of Paterson's Victorias for planting 

 on the royal farms at Windsor, and that letter is 



