550 Kitchen Garden Esculents of American Origin. [June, 
of Jamaica. The name appears in Long’s list, edition of 1774. 
C. tetragonum Mill., 1737, is referred by him to C. annuum L., 
and also to C. grossum L., to which latter form it appears to 
rightly belong. It is now cultivated under the name of paprika in 
ower Hungary ona large scale, the fruit three and a half to five 
inches long and three-quarters to one inch in diameter! As this 
is a sweet variety, it is probably C. grossum, which is a form with 
very variable fruit. The name Jdonnet pepper is used by Miller, 
1743, for C. angulosum, as already stated. 
C. violaceum Humb. is apparently a variety of C. annuum, but 
the plant more or less deeply violet-tinted, the fruit black-violet 
on one side and reddish-green on the other, but becoming. red in 
ripening. It came from Spanish America, and is now an occa- 
sional inmate of our gardens. 
The twenty-two named varieties grown during 1882 and 1883 
at the New York Agricultural Experiment Station seem to 
belong to C. annuum L., and while we are not prepared to affirm 
that they all can be identified with one or the other of the above 
named species, yet we think there is probable identification suffi- 
cient to justify the conclusion that no strongly marked sorts have 
appeared during the five centuries of European culture. When 
we consider that the various kinds of peppers easily cross-fertil- 
ize, and hence the difficulty of keeping the sorts distinct, we are 
led to believe that many of the forms which have received spe- 
cific description are true agricultural or form-species, sufficiently 
distinct at their first appearance by discovery to justify a conclu- 
sion as to a long antiquity, and as to their power of resisting 
change. The whole genus needs revision from an agricultural 
instead of a strictly botanical standpoint. 
Potato—De Candolle in his Origin of Cultivated Plants, says 
truly: “No one can doubt that the potato is of American ori- 
gin.” There are some interesting notes, however, which De 
Candolle has not used. Prescott in his Conquest of Peru? says 
in 1526 Pizarro, at the Rio de San Juan, eat the potato as it grew 
without cultivation, This evidence is as conclusive as to its wild 
_ State as the one which De Candolle quotes from Gray, which 
_ “sufficiently proves its wild state in Chili, viz., that even among 
the Araucanians, in the mountains of Malvarco, the soldiers of 
1 Gard, Chron., Sept. 10, 1881,343. 
71, 248, 
