Page:Treatise on Cultivation of the Potato.djvu/39

 found in the books, and even these they did not attend to. I forgot or omitted to tell them that the produce of each seed, being a different individual ("variety") ought to be kept separate from the others, and in every instance which I know of they mixed them all up together, so that in place of a good selection to propagate by the tuber, they have only an average of the plant, average in yield, average in quality and average in liability to disease, not ripening together, and not being capable of being cooked together.

Forty or fifty of them reported to me, as they all had promised to do, the results of their experiments, and their reports would seem lo show that the seedling potatoes grown under the common usual conditions are much less liable to the disease than old varieties.

Some of them grow as much as 200 acres each season; some of them agree with me that a branch of a plant is only a branch of an individual life, whether it be separated from the original stem or not;—almost all of them think that the potato in time "deteriorates," "degenerates," "wears out;" and they are unanimous in believing that new "varieties" should now be obtained from the seed.

My experiments were, however, more carefully made, and very naturally so, from the amount of money and time I had previously expended on the condensation and preservation of the plant, or the plant's tubers rather; a matter which I was led to go into, as follows:—Twenty years ago (1856), turning over the leaves of M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary, I found it stated "that the rapid extension of the taste for, and the cultivation of, this exotic has no parallel in the history of industry; it (meaning the potato) has had, and will continue to have, the most powerful influence over the condition of mankind—but it labours under the disadvantage of being incapable of preservation, so that the surplus produce of a luxuriant crop cannot be stored over (like the cereals) to meet a subsequent scarcity; and from its great bulk and weight and the difficulty of preserving it on shipboard, the expense of carrying it from one country to another is so very great, that a scarcity can never be materially relieved by importing it from abroad."

Thereupon I set before myself the task of endeavouring to condense and preserve it.

After ten years' labour, suddenly at night, the truth flashed on me. I had perfected the invention five years previously, and I had