POTATO, Solanum t•uberosum (see one of the most important of cultivated plants, and in universal cultivation in the temperate parts of the globe. It is a peren nial, having herbaceous stems, 1-3 feet high, without thorns or prickles; pinnate leaves with two or more pair of leaflets and an odd one, the leaflets entire at the margin; flowers about an inch or an inch and a half in breadth, the wheel-shaped corolla being white or purple, and more or less veined; followed by globular, purplish fruit, of the size of ordinary gooseberries; the roots producing tubers. The herbage has a slightly nar cotic smell, although cattle do not refuse to eat a little of it, and the tender tops are used in some countries like spinach. The tubers are, however, the only valuable part of the plant.
The potato is a native of mountainous districts of tropical and subtropical Americti, probably from Chiii to Mexico; but there is difficulty in deciding where it is really indi genous, and where it has spread after being introduced by man. Humboldt doubted if it had ever been found truly wild; but subsequent travelers, of high scientific reputa tion, express themselves thoroughly satisfied on this point. Except that the tubers are smaller, the wild plant differs little from the cultivated. Maize and the potato are the two greatest gifts which America has given to the rest of the world. The potato has been cultivated in America, and its tubers used for food, from times long anterior to the discovery of America by Europeans. It seems to have been first brought to Europe by the Spaniards, from the neighborhood of Quito, in the beginning of the 16th c., and spread from Spain into the Netherlands, Burgundy, and Italy, but only to be cultivated in a few gardens as a curiosity, and not for general use as an article of food. It long received throughout almost all European countries the same name with the batatas (q.v.), or sweet potato, which is the plant or tuber meant by English writers down to the middle of the 17th c., in their use of the name potato. It appears to have been
brought to Ireland front Virginia by Hawkins, a slave-trader, in 1565; and to England by sir Francis Drake, in 1585, without attracting much notice, till it was a third time America by sir Walter Raleigh. It was still a lopg time before it began to be extensively cultivated. Gerard, in his Herbal, published hi1597, gives a figure of it under the name of batata Virginiana; but so little were its merits appreciated that it is not even mentioned in the Complete Gardener of London and Wise, published more than a century later, in 1719; while another writer of the same time says it is inferior to skirret and radish ! It began, however, to be imagined that it might be used with advan tage for feeding " swine or other cattle," and by and by that it might be useful for poor people, and for the prevention of famine on failures of the grain crops. The royal society took up this idea, and in 1663 adopted measures for extending the cultivation of the potato, in order to the prevention of famines. To this the example of Ireland in some measure led, the potato having already come into cultivation there, to an extent far greater than in any other European country, and with evident advantage to the people. From Ireland, the cultivation of the potato was introduced into Lancashire about the end of the 17th c., soon became general there, and thence spread over Eng land; so that, before the middle of the 18th c., it had become important as a field crop, which it became in the s. of Scotland some 29 or 30 years later; about the same time, in Saxony and some other parts of Germany; but not until the latter part of the century in some other parts of Germany and in France. In France, the extension of potato culture was very much due to the exertions of Parmeutier. In some parts of Germany, the governments took an interest in it, and promoted it by compulsory regulations.