Page:Treatise on Cultivation of the Potato.djvu/8

 its organs of reproduction, and the fields become completely flowerless, the state to which the Cruffle and others are now reduced; and I predicted that in a few years more the "sets" of these old flowerless plants would fail to germinate, they would rot in the earth; and that this death from old age would be supposed to be a disease, and be called as heretofore the "Miss."

I further inferred that as the potato became aged, it became so weak as to be unable to resist the attack of the parasite whose growth in the body of the plant forms the disease, and that in order to extirpate the parasite it would be necessary to grow young vigorous plants from the seed.

Upon this I was met by the assertion that from experiments made on "the Continent," it had been ascertained that seedling potatoes were quite as liable to the Disease as the old varieties; but I knew of my own knowledge that all the main varieties of the plant which were in cultivation in the North of Ireland in 1840 were dead, and that all potatoes were not—consequently that some at least of the new were hardier or healthier than the old: and I resolved to make the experiment for myself.

I had expended "upwards of five thousand pounds in money, and perhaps fifty thousand in time, in perfecting an invention for the condensation and preservation of the potato; an invention which had met with the approval of the late Baron Liebig, and of a commissioner appointed to investigate the matter by the late Emperor Napoleon, to whom I had offered the French Patent. I had mounted a factory in the Vosges for the purpose of demonstrating the value of the invention (in which, in the opinion of the Emperor's Commissioner, I had succeeded perfectly); but this was in the Spring of 1870, and the Avar arrested my proceedings in France; whereupon I returned to Belfast, put up a factory there, and found myself again arrested by the potato disease. By it I was brought to a complete stand-still, and hence my attention became directed to the plant itself, its history, mode of cultivation, and the possible cause of the disease. At once it struck me like a thunderbolt—the plant had been propagated everywhere from time immemorial by merely cutting it to pieces. Cultivation from the bud and never from the seed, was the constant concomitant of the disease; everything else varied—soil, temperature, moisture, manure, everything, excepting only cultivation from the "set": it was