Blandford Weekly News. — 1889-06-29 (Blandford, Dorset, England)

ORIGIN OF THE POTATO.  The following is from an exceedingly interesting article in the Corn/silt Magazine on "The Potato's Place in History" :—All over the earth, in tropical, subtropical, am] temperate climates, there grow various members of an uncanny and highly suspected family known to botanists as the solansceie or nightshades. ' A more unpromising group than these doubtful herbs in which to look for a human foodstuff could hardly be imagined. There are families, like the grasses, which supply mankind with endless useful plants—wheat, rye, Indian coni, barley, millet, oats, rice, and sugarcane. There are others, like the pea tribe, almost every one of which has some economic value, either directly for human food as in the ease of peas, beans, and lentils, or indirectly for fodder, as in the case of clover, vetch, lucerne, and sainfoin. But the nightshades are just one of those ill-omened families which bear on their very faces the obviousmarice of an evil disposition, and which are regarded with a certain shrinking instinctive disfavour even by those who have no firsthand knowledge of their oblectionable character. One of them is the well-known belladonna or deadly nightshade, which haunts old ruins or monastic buildings, and contains a powerful acrid narcotic poison, famous for its stupefying and relaxing action on the retina. Its flowers are a lurid brown in colour, and look as deadly to the sight as they really are. Its berry is black, shining, and uncanny; and the whole plant has a distinctly murderous air, which its popular name exactly expresses. The potato, in fact, is a solitary well-behaved and respectable member of a peculiarly abandoned and dissolute family—a family in which poisoning and witchci aft and all evil practices run riot as commonly as crime and murder in a Mediieval Italian princely house. For almost all the ether nightshades bear out in their way the evil repute of belladonna.. One of them is mandrake—the mysterious mandrake—that plant with forked roots, gathered by moonlight under the gallows shade for purposes of enchantment and of unholy sites, and incidentally known to scientific medicine as an almost equally dangerotui and virulent narcotic. A second is that curious half-mythicalplant, the Apple of Sodom or Dead Sea Fruit, whose leaves are thickly coveredmith bristling needles, and whose tawny berries are filled within the ashes that overwhelmed the Cities of the Plain, though modern botany unpoetically describes it as a common shrub of Corsica Sicily, and the eastern Miditennnean. Then there is the bittersweet or climbing nightshade of our English, hedgerows, whose wicked lilac flowers of uncerta,n hue ought to be enough to warn anybody of its evil intent, but whose treacherous red berries filled with a poisonous narcotic priuciple, are answerable every year for the deaths of a good many villagechildren. And more terrible still is the common black nightshade of our waste places, known in French as herbe dermagie-kns, whose Juice is powerful enough, when externally applied, to get rid of warts, and, when internally administered, to get rid of one's enemies. Even the potato itself is not wholly above suspicion in this particular; for, though the tubers are wholesome enough (when decently cooked), the berries or potato apples are said sometimes to have proved highly undesirable for those bold spirits who ventured to experiment upon them, and, in the concise language of a medical authority, "to have ' determined headache, nausea, era advanced symptoms of atropine poisoning."