357 
marched the soldiers of the garrison to choose their destiny ;— 
and Mr. Macaulay, in describing this scene, took occasion to 
state—among the various circumstances that influenced the 
minds of the men who were then either to expatriate them- 
selves, or to remain under what they considered a foreign yoke 
—the remembrance of their homes, their potato garden, and 
their clamp of turf, with other attractions of a like nature, 
which still sway the Irish peasantry. 
‘«¢ Recently Dr. John Davy wrote me a letter, in which 
he questioned this early use of the potato as the general food 
of the people, on account of the statement in the ‘ Great 
Geographical Dictionary,’ published in 1694, that, ‘in hard 
times, they [the Irish] lived on water-cresses, roots, mush- 
rooms, shamrocks, oatmeal, milk, and such other slender diet.’ 
I have again looked into some authorities to see whether 
the views of Dr. Davy are supported, or those which I my- 
self had expressed in the Dublin periodical alluded to, and in 
which I stated, that in Munster especially the potato formed 
the staple food of the Irish about the middle of the seventeenth 
century. The writer in the ‘Geographical Dictionary’ probably 
took Spencer and Campion, who wrote more than a century 
before, as his authorities. 
‘¢Some difficulty has attended the investigation of this 
subject, from the circumstance of inquirers not distinguishing 
between the true potato, Solanum tuberosum, and the ‘sweet 
potato,’ Convolvulus batata, or, as it is sometimes called by 
old writers, the Spanish potato. 
‘* It is generally believed that Sir Walter Raleigh intro- 
duced the potato into Ireland. Sir Joseph Banks came to 
the conclusion when he wrote his Essay (being an attempt to 
discover the time in which the potato was introduced into the 
British isles) that it was brought by Raleigh into England, 
and from England into Ireland about the year 1600. It must 
have been at least before the year 1602, because the estates of 
Raleigh then passed into the Boyle family, and his connexion 
with Ireland ceased. 
