312 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
looking little flower with a delicate perfume among 
the grasses, it grew to be more when I heard the 
history of the plant in cultivation, and how it had 
been used as food by the Aborigines both in North 
and South America for long centuries before the 
discovery of the great green continent, and just as 
the yellow-haired Demeter, the Corn Mother, and 
her loved lost daughter Persephone, the Corn 
Maiden, were worshipped in ancient Greece; and 
as the Rice Mother is worshipped in the East, in 
many lands and islands; and as the Maize Mother 
and God were worshipped in all the Americas, by 
nations savage and civilised, so did the Peruvians, 
who built temples glittering with gold to their 
chief god, the sun, and to the sun’s children, the 
lightning and rainbow, worship the Potato Mother, 
and pray to her to look kindly on their labours 
when the seed was committed to the ground and to 
give them good increase. 
Finally I came to know the history of the 
introduction of the potato into these islands by 
Sir Walter Raleigh. This action served to make 
him appear to me the greatest of all the shining 
Elizabethans—greatest in all he thought, said, and 
did, good or evil; as courtier, poet, explorer and 
buccaneering adventurer and seeker after a golden 
city in savage wildernesses; as prisoner in the 
Tower and author of that most eloquent History 
of the World; and, most beautiful of all, on the 
scaffold, by the block, the headsman with his 
glittering axe standing by him, when, like a king 
