270 
On the Cultivated Potato. 
Sir Joseph Banks aud Dunal have been quite right to insist on this fact of 
first introduction by the Spaniards, as for a long time especial mention was 
made of Walter Kaleigh, who was the second importer, and of other 
Englishmen who had brought, not the potato, but the Batate, which is more 
or less mixed up with it. And yet the celebrated botanist, De I'Ecluso, had 
stated the facts with great accuracy. He it was who published the first good 
description and print of the potato under the significant name of Papas 
Peruamrum. From what he says, three centuries of cultivation have pro- 
duced little change in the six'cies, for it produced originally as many as fifty 
tubercles of difterent sizes, being about two inches long, of an irregular 
ovoid shape, reddish in colour ; they ripened about November [in Vienna], 
The tlower was more or less pink outside, of a pale pink inside, with five green 
longitudinal lines ; this is often seen nowadays. Numerous varieties have no 
doubt been obtained, but the original type has not been lost. The only 
difference between our present plants and the original ones is that De I'Echise 
com pares the perfume of the flowers with that of the lime-trees. He sowed some 
seeds which produced a variety with white flowers, as we see sometimes now. 
The plants described by De I'Ecluse had been sent to him in 1588 by 
Philippe de Sivry, Seigneur of Waldheim, Goveraor of Mons, who, in his 
turn, obtained them from some one attached to the Poj^e's legate in Belgium. 
De TEcluse says that the species had been received into Italy from Spain or 
America (" certum est vel ex Hispaniis, vel ex America habuisse"), and he is 
sui-prised that, having become so common in Italy that it was eaten like 
turnips and given to the pigs, the savants of the University of Padua should 
have been made aware of it by the tubercles that he sent them from German3% 
Targioni could not prove that the potato was as generally cultivated in Italy 
at the end of the sixteenth century as De I'Ecluse says, but he quotes Father 
Magazzini,deValombrosa, whose posthumous work, published in 1623, mentions 
the species as having been brouglit previously, without giving any date, from 
Spain or Portugal by barefoot friars. The cultivation must therefore have 
spread in Tuscany about the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the 
seventeenth century. Independently of what De I'Ecluse and the agriculturist 
De Valombrosa say about the importation by the Spaniards, it is not at all 
likely that the Italians should have had any intercourse with Pialeigh's 
companions. 
Nobody can doubt that the potato came originally from America, but to- 
tell from what part exactly of that large continent, we must know whether 
the plant grows there spontaneously, and in which localities. 
To answer this question clearly, we must remove two causes of error : 
firstly, allied species of the genus Solanum have been mistaken for the potato; 
secondly, that travellers may have been mistaken about the "characteristics of 
the spontaneous plant. 
The kindred species are the Solanum Commersonii of Dunal, mentioned 
above ; the S. Magliu of Molina, a species from Chili ; the S. immite of Dunal, 
which comes from Peru ; and the S. verrucosum of Schlechtendal, which 
grows in Mexico. These four kinds of Solanum have smaller tubers than 
the >S. tuberosum, and differ also by other characteristics mentioned in works 
on botany. Theoretically, it may be believed that all these varieties, 
and others growing in America, come from one original parent stock, but at 
our geological epoch they offer diflerences which seem to me to justify their 
being considered as a distinct species, and no experiments have been made to 
ascertain whether, by cross-fertilising the wild types, a race might not be 
obtained which might be perpetuated by seed. We will leave alone these 
more or less doubtful questions about the species, and try to find out whether 
the common kind of the Sohinuta tuberosum has been found wild; only let 
us mark that the abundance of the tuber-producing Solanum, growing in the 
