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 



