Mr. Butlers Discourse. 169 



character and so useful to his species, that I cannot resist the 

 opportunity of noticing those to which I have referred, a little 

 more particularly. He was employed, during the war of 

 1756, in the hospital department of the army of Hanover, and 

 inconsequence of his zeal in the pursuit of knowledge, which 

 often led him to imprudent exposures, he was five times taken 

 prisoner, and more than once subjected to the horrors of fa- 

 mine. Whilst in prison he frequently had no other food than 

 the potatoe, then beginning to he cultivated, though neither 

 valued nor understood, in the German states. His scientific 

 knowledge enabled him to analvze the qualities of the root, 

 and to discover the uses to which it could be applied. After 

 the peace of 1763, he returned to Paris, and pursued with ar- 

 dor every branch of science connected with the support of ani- 

 mal life ; and it was not long before he had an opportunity of 

 rendering his knowledge most useful to the public. The 

 dearth in 1769 called the attention of the French ministers 

 and savans to the vegetables which were calculated to supply 

 the place of bread corn ; and the potatoe was introduced into 

 several districts. The old clamor was revived ; and the ve- 

 getable was again proscribed, and would have been rejected 

 as poisonous, if Parmentier, in a prize discourse submitted to 

 the academy of Besancon in 1773, on the " vegetables which 

 in times of scarcity, may supply the place of those that are 

 usually employed for the nourishment of man," and in a " che- 

 mical examination of the potatoe" submitted to the comptrol- 

 ler general in the same year, had not vindicated its character 

 and demonstrated its usefulness. Nor did his exertions stop 

 here. He cultivated it himself; he persuaded the nobility to 

 place it on their tables ; he induced the king to wear a bou- 

 quet of potatoe-blossoms in full court, on the day of a solemn 

 fete ; he studied the most palatable modes of culinary prepara- 

 tion ; and on one occasion, he gave a dinner consisting only of 

 potatoes, but of potatoes served up in twenty different forms. 

 The opposition he was obliged to encounter may be judged of 

 from the fact, that when it was proposed during the revolu- 

 tion, to elect him to a municipal office, he was opposed on the 

 ground that "he would make the common people eat nothing 

 but potatoes," for, (said one of the voters) " it is he who in-. 

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