274 
On the Cultivated Potato. 
request in American plantations, also in Ireland, and will no 
doubt grow if planted in England ; it requires garden-mould." 
The Duchess of Buccleugh's ' Household Book,' for the year 
1701, mentions a peck from Edinburgh, which cost 2s. 6c?. ; 
but this instance was exceptional, because until the latter part 
of the last century, when famine driven, the cultivation propor- 
tionately outstripped that in England, the Scotch were averse 
to the potato. There is no mention of it in the Bible. To 
those who know intimately the Scotch domestic history of the 
period, this fact, in the strong language of those days, was 
" damnably uncanny : " besides, as we have seen from our 
Shaksperian reference, the potato had then a bad moral reputa- 
tion, which must have greatly influenced a community that 
dealt furiously with irregularities of the affections — for example, 
one Currie, a tailor, was in 1692 sentenced to death for wedding 
his first wife's half-brother's daughter.* 
Man has been defined as a tool-makingf-animal. If we sought 
to raise up a perfect example — and desired to exclaim, " Behold 
a man I " we doubtless should have recourse more to the oatmeal 
" girnal " than to the potato pie. It is calculated that 100 parts 
of good wheat-flour contain as much actual nutriment as 613 
parts of potatoes. t Limited cultivation and the lazybed sy stem 
had to a great extent kept the plant healthy : this natural and 
necessarily distributed culture was now to be superseded by ex- 
tensive field-cultivation, whether in hillocks, drills, or on the 
flat. Field-cultivation, which greatly increased the national 
wealth, dates from about the year 1728, when, owing to forced 
cultivation and unnatural propagation, the plant soon developed 
that tendency to disease which by its ratio of increase became 
afterwards a puzzle and a terror. Burton % the historian has it 
that the potato was not introduced into the West Country of 
Scotland until twelve years later, but there he is probably mis- 
taken, because Lord Cathcart § mentions in his diary, under 
date Feb. 26, 1728, that at Dalmellington, in Ayrshire, he was 
busied with the cultivation of potatoes. On Saturday the 13th 
of July, 1734, he visited Thomas Fordyce of Cranston, near 
Edinburgh, and went over his farm, to return delighted with 
t lie fifty acres of potatoes — and not bad for the period; on the 
Sunday they took a turn round to see the cattle, the sainfoin, and 
* Chambers, 'Dom. Annals Scot.,' vol. iii. p. .i9. 
t The tuber in a fiesli state contains about 71-80 per cent, of water : 15-20 per 
Cent, of starch ; 3-7 per cent, of fibre ; 3-4 per cent, of {rum, sugar, &c. ; and 
onlv 2 per cent, of the albuminoids or flesh-formers. ' Cliambers's Encyc. : ' Art., 
PotiltO. 
: Hist. Scot., V. ii. p. 397. 
J General Charles, 8tli Lord Catlicart, died in command of expedition to 
Carthageua, 1740. 
