DeCandolle’s Origin of Cultivated Plants. 247 
country being too cold.” As to the name—he was as unde- 
cided as have been some botanists since his time: “the 
Spaniards call them Batatas, and also Camotes or Amotes; some 
also Ajes; yet, as they say, they differ among themselves, and 
the root of Batatas may be much the sweeter and the more 
tender,’ 
This confusion of names dates from the time of Columbus— 
for Clusius was not, by half a ahh the first to speak of the 
Batata. (It ma be worth notin , In parenthesis, that Batatas, 
the specific name adopted by Tiwiiabaes and as the name of a 
genus by Choisy, is the Spanish plural of Batata, the aboriginal 
name.) Hven Peter Martyr and Oviedo do not agree, in all 
particulars, as to the distinction between Ayes and Batatas—a 
distinction which both recognize. In the 9th book of his 
second Decade, written about 1514, Peter Martyr (ed. 1574, p. 
191) describing the fruits, etc., of the province of Ur; aba, 
Darien, names, for the first time, Batate: ‘They dig from the 
earth, ” he e says, “roots that grow spontaneously ‘(swaple natura 
nascentes), the natives call them Batatas [accus. plaral], which 
when I saw I thought to be rapes of Lombardy osubres 
m 
terre and Tuber terre of the old botanists]. In whatever way 
euey 2 are cooked, roasted or boiled, they yield in delicate sweet- 
ness,* to no con fectionery or other eatable whatsoever.” hey 
are, he adds, ‘‘also planted and cultivated in gardens.” In his 
8d Decade (lib. 4, p. 240) he mentions “ maize, yucca, ages and 
battate,” as plants that grew in Honduras when Columbus. 
landed on that coast in 1502; ; and in the same Deuude (lib. 5, 
p- 261), he names the same four plants as the ordinary food of 
the people of Caramaira (east of Darien) “as of the others,” and 
again takes occasion to name the battatas, as surpassing all else 
‘mira quédam dulci mollitie—especiall y if one falls on the 
better sort (noWittores) of them 
viedo gives a good description of the Batata, which, when 
he wrote (1525-85), was commonly cultivated by the Indians 
in gt een and elsewhere, and highly prized (Hist. gen., lib. 
,c. It resembles the Ayes, he says, in appearance, but 
tien better ata is far more delicate. The leaf is more notch 
(harpada) than that of the Age, in nearly the same fashion. 
me varieties are better than others, and he gives the names 
of the five kinds aie are most highly esteemed. [Peter Martyr 
(dee. iii, lib. 9, p. 302) included “the same five names amon ig 
the nine varieties of Ajes that he mentioned as distinct; but in 
this, as in other matters pertaining of natural page Oviedo 
is the better wubiowity!? “When the Bataias are well cured, 
* The sweet potato was an inspiration to Peter Martyr, who rarely indulged 
himself in such a flight as “‘ dulcorata mollities. 
