POTATOE. 85 



taste and virtues of the same. We may call it 

 in English, Potatoes of America or Virginia. 

 They are a foode, as also a meate for pleasure, 

 equal in goodnesse and wholesomness vnto 

 the common potato, being either rosted in 

 the embers or boiled and eaten with oile, 

 vinegar, and pepper, or dressed any other 

 way by the hand of some cunning in cookerie." 

 Lord Bacon, whose Natural History was 

 written soon after Gerard's Herbal, calls them 

 Potado-roots, and says, " If potado-roots be 

 set in a pot filled with earth, and then the 

 pot with earth be set likewise within the 

 ground some two or three inches, the rootes 

 will grow greater than ordinary. The cause 

 may be, for that having earth enough within 

 the pot to nourish them, and then being 

 stopped by the bottome of the pot from put- 

 ting strings downward, they must needs grow 

 greater in breadth and thicknesse. And il 

 may be that all seed roots, potted and s( 

 set into the earth, will prosper the better." 



Early in the 17th century this root was 

 planted in the gardens of the nobility as a 

 curious exotic. 



The potatoe appears to have been es- 

 teemed a great delicacy in the time of James 

 the First ; for in the year 16 19 it is noticed 



