1878.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
4,23 
TEE EtDTOEEOML 
engraving ; its ends fit into two holes in the cap ; 
when not in use, this handle is removed and laid 
upon the ice-box. A case holding 72 quarts, when 
filled and ready for shipment, weighs about 250 lbs. 
Though Mr. Due has taken out a patent for the in¬ 
vention, he liberally allows us to say that he will 
permit any fruit grower to make the box for his 
own use, without exacting a royalty for his patent. 
What Is a Sweet Potato? 
BT PROF. ASA GRAY. 
We speak of Potatoes and Sweet Ibtatoes, as if our 
common Potato was the real thing and the saccha¬ 
rine subject of this article had got its name from its 
similarity to the other. The fact is 
just the other way. Batatas, whence 
the English word Potatoes, is a South 
American native name for the Sweet 
Potato, which was known to Euro¬ 
peans, and under this name, before 
anything was known of our tuber. 
The latter and later known was taken 
for a sort of Batatas ; and, being the 
only one which could he raised as a 
crop in Northern Europe, it usurped 
the name of Potato among English- 
speaking people generally; but here 
only at the North. At the South, the 
Potato is a Sweet Potato, and its 
Peruvian namesake is an Irish or 
White Potato. This cold-country Po¬ 
tato we all understand to be a tuber; 
and a tuber is a sort of underground 
stem, or mostly the thickened tip of 
an underground stem. A sleuder sub¬ 
terranean shoot thickens at the farther 
end or tip, for a space that includes 
several joints with their side buds, 
or eyes, and this is the Potato. 
Now, what is a Sweet Potato ? Is 
it a tuber like its namesake, or is it a 
root ? That the old botanists called it 
a root, settles nothing; for they did 
not distinguish any better than people 
in genera] do now. I had always re¬ 
garded it as a true root. It is de¬ 
scribed or mentioned as such by 
French and German botanists gener¬ 
ally ; but in some English botanical 
text books it ranks as a tuber. On 
the other side of the Atlantic they are 
not so familiar with Sweet Potatoes as 
we are. But even here I find that some 
of our botanists are puzzled by them. 
It is easy to see why. Sweet Pota¬ 
toes are propagated from shoots which freely spring 
from the parent potato, and from the sides of it, not 
from the very top as in a beet and turnip. In these 
the thick root is formed by direct growth from the 
seed ; and the very top is stem, and so bears a bud, 
or buds. The Sweet Potato—which we never raise 
from seed—springs from the lower part of the slip 
we planted, and from the under side of the branches 
which trail and creep along the ground. If these 
Potatoes spring from stems, as common Potatoes 
do, why are they not of the nature of stem, as com¬ 
mon Potatoes are? We planted a little experi¬ 
mental Sweet Potato patch, to settle that question, 
and dug into it from time to time, to see what 
was going on. It turns out as I expected. In the 
underground growth of common Potato plants there 
are two clearly different things produced, namely: 
1. Slender roots, which branch freely and taper at 
the end into fibres. 2. Slender branches of evi¬ 
dently different appearance as to their surface, 
ending in the Potato, on which the regular little 
scales that answer to leaves are visible almost from 
the first, and the eyes or buds just above them 
soon appear. In the Sweet Potato plant, all the 
young growth is of one sort, all are clearly roots ; 
and after a while some of these roots thicken up 
more or less, and at length the stronger ones be¬ 
come Potatoes. As the summer advances, rootlets 
strike from the lower side of the creeping stems, 
at or near the joints, in considerable numbers; 
these penetrate the soil, and some of these, pre¬ 
cisely like the others, thicken into Potatoes. [The 
engraving shows a part of the original “ set,” or 
cutting, and one of the numerous creeping stems, 
at the joints of which roots have formed ; some of 
these are beginning to thicken at the end to form 
potatoes. To save space, the roots are some¬ 
what shorter in proportion than they natur¬ 
ally are.— Eds.] There are all stages here— 
from slender roots to slender Potatoes. Nothing 
can be clearer than that these Sweet Potatoes are 
really roots. That they will produce buds is 
no argument to the contrary. Hundreds of species 
of plants may be propagated by root-cuttings. 
These buds appear near the upper end of some of 
my Sweet Potatoes, while they are still young or 
small ; and in some they are starting into shoots. 
THE SWEET POTATO. 
But none of them start from the axils of little 
scales, and they are without order. They are like 
the buds on the roots of Osage Orange, Blackberry, 
etc., by which these plants are freely propagated 
by root-cuttings. It is clear to me that a Sweet 
Potato is a true root, but one that has a happy 
proclivity to produce adventitious buds, which im¬ 
memorial propagation in this way has confirmed. 
Ivy—Begin Now.— When we see a window 
furnished with the most beautiful of all screens, a 
living one of Ivy, or a room in which the vine is 
made to run upon cornices or surround the picture 
frames, if we do not envy the possessor, we feel 
a strong wish that we had something like it. Re¬ 
collect that all this luxuriance had a beginning; 
this vine, the total length of which measures 
yards, was once but a few inches long. A small 
cutting, a little care, and time. These were all 
the outlay required for this treasure of verdure— 
and all these are within the reach of every one. 
Time, indeed, is the chief element, but after a fair 
start has been made, less is required than one 
would suppose. Make a beginning; if with a 
rooted plant, all the better; if only a cutting or 
“ slip ” can be had, start with that, for it will take 
root with the greatest ease. When growing, give 
it a fairly rich soil; water as needed, and— 
especially this—remove the dust from the leaves as 
often as it accumulates, by the use of a sponge 
and warm water, and in time the reward will come, 
m- For other Household Items see “ Basket ” pages. 
Home Topics. 
BY FAITH ROCHESTER. 
Does it Pay to Make Ragr Carpets P 
To make or not to make a rag carpet—that is the 
question. I have rags enough to carpet another 
room, and I need another every-day carpet. When 
I see the bags and boxes where the old cleansed 
garments and pieces fit for a rag carpet are packed 
away, the impulse seizes me to go to work and get 
them converted into a plain serviceable carpet. 
It seems for a moment that this course 
must be true economy. But is it ? I 
have made one carpet within a year. 
There it is again—“I made it.” 
Mother cut and sewed nine-tenths of 
the rags, and I let her do it —for which 
1 hope to be forgiven. For when it 
came to weaving, the warp and weav¬ 
ing cost me thirty cents a yard, and I 
had an opportunity a few months be¬ 
fore to buy an entirely new rag carpet 
quite as good as mine for fifty cents a 
yard, and other strong cheap carpet¬ 
ing can be bought for the same price. 
That leaves twenty cents a yard for 
cutting and sewing the rags, to say 
nothing of the rags themselves, which 
are worth something for paper rags, 
and a few for dealing with the 
“second-hand man.” Twenty cents 
a yard for cutting and sewing the 
rags ! And it takes from a pound to a 
pound and a half of the rags to make 
a yard of carpeting, and it would be 
a hard day’s work to sew two pounds 
of rags so short as mine averaged, 
made largely of children’s clothing 
and other old garments. It did not 
pay my mother and me, and when we 
handed the rags over to the weaver 
we felt that we had been doing a 
foolish thing. With a sigh of relief, 
mother turned from the rags to the 
regular sewing, which she had been 
wishing to help about, and as she 
mended and repaired, and made but¬ 
ton-holes, and did the necessary hand¬ 
sewing on garments mostly made by 
machine, I felt how much more 
than twenty or thirty cents a day 
was her help, and what a hateful 
thing my rag carpet would always be to me. Like 
many another mother with children grown up and 
full of the cares of children and housekeeping, 
mother wishes to help her children when she visits 
them, but she shall never sew carpet rags again. 
But now I have hired help. As some excuse for 
getting her—for I was afraid that what I knew to 
be exhaustion might look like laziness to others— 
I said, “and while she stays we will make the rest 
of my rags into another carpet.” But there is 
plenty else to occupy our time, in the way of sew¬ 
ing as well as housework. And 1 want my girl to 
have some time for her own, every day—not only 
time to make her own clothes, but time for some 
evening game. No, her time is too precious for 
carpet rags. Well, here are the children. Two 
little girls old enough to handle a needle, and a boy 
who could (with some difficulty !) be dragooned 
into the business. They all have a few regular 
chores each day—enough to make them feel that 
they are helping to bear the family burdens, and I 
honestly think that these are enough at present, 
with the lessons they have at school and at home. 
For I believe heartily in play, both out-doors and 
in, and I want to leave room for it and to encourage 
it as a legitimate thing. The thirty cents a yard 
which I should pay for warp and weaving (I might 
possibly get it for loss now), would buy me a good 
carpet of straw matting, and if I should count in 
the time spent in cutting and sewing, and the value 
of the rags, I could get a more expensive carpet 
