Transcibed by Teena from the Armagh Guardian 3 Feb. 1846
The Potato Disease and It's Remedies The Rev. J. W. DEVLIN, Vicar of Stanford, Norfolk, has kindly forwarded us a copy of Dr. BUCKLAND's lecture on this subject, which we willingly insert. The paper has been sent to all the parochial clergy of England, with a view to its publicity, and in order to the carrying out the learned Professor's philanthropic intentions. The document will both interesting and advantageous to our readers; Dr. BUCKLAND's attention was first called to this vegetable malady when he was in Paris early in September last, where he found great apprehensions on account of a disease affecting generally the potatoes all over France and still more destructively in Belgium. From his place at the Institute on the 8th Sept., he heard communications by Professor Payen and on the 15th Sept., by Professor Payen, Professor Pouchet and other scientific observers, on this subject. He also attended a meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society of Paris, summoned for the special purpose of investigating the cause, and suggesting remedies for this wide-spread vegetable disease, from which great fears were entertained of a deficiency of food during the approaching winter. In the middle of October he witnessed the diseased state of one-third the potato crop as they were dug up in allotments of the poor on good but undrained land, at Drayton Manor, in Staffordshire. About the same time he saw alarming confirmations of the universality of the disease in England, Scotland and Ireland. And being invited to present a prize in Chemistry to a medical pupil in Queen's College, Birmingham, on the 28th Sept., he felt it his duty to awaken public attention to the great danger of scarcity next winter and spring unless immediate steps be taken, ere it is too late, to stop the progress of this disease. The fine weather in November has partially arrested the destruction, even of the infected potatoes, but when wet weather comes, it will go on with fatal rapidity, unless means be taken "instantly" to arrest it. People are unwilling to believe in the general extent of the evil, though everyone knows it in his own village. The potatoes rot faster and sooner from wet lands than dry; but there is scarcely one parish where the tubers have entirely escaped. The early crops have suffered least, some of them not at all, having had more time to ripen than the later crops. Hot sun blasts, and frosts, and rain, during summer, having destroyed the leaves, the tubers have not been completely formed, and are loaded with a morbid dropsical excess of water, which, unless they are kept dry, acts on the imperfect cells and fibres of the potato, and brings on premature decay or wet rot, which destroys the tuber. The potato (solunum tuberosum) was first imported to this country by Harriott, the companion of Raleigh, from Virginia, where its native name was Openawk. It had before been brought to Spain from Quito, where its native name was Papas, which the Spaniards converted to Battata. It was first cultivated in Ireland by Sir R. Southwell, and in Sir W. Raleigh’s garden at Youghal, where his gardener, assuming that the seed balls were the object of its cultivation, condemned them as uneatable fruit. A ship wrecked near the mouth of the Ribble, first brought them to Lancashire. For more than a century they were grown only in gardens, in 1732, the first field crop was planted in Scotland. Many hybrid varieties hare been obtained from seed and all these are further propagated by tubers. There is no foundation for the opinion that degeneracy has taken place and there is no occasion to get new varieties from fresh seed, in consequence of the imperfect ripening, which has led to wet rot in the present year. The disease is not new, it is frequent in Canada, wherever a frost in summer kills the leaves before the tuber is perfect. Loss of the leaves has also caused the decay of the potatoes by wet rot in the present year, over nearly all Europe and in parts of North America. This disease has never yet occurred so generally since the potato was brought from America, but it has been locally subject to imperfect formation called the 'Curl', arising probably from want of lime in the soil, and to a rot, or decay, of the sets when planted in wet soil or in wet weather; the remedy for which is to shake the tubers cut for setting, in a sieve of quick lime, until it forms a skin over the cut surface; it is still better to plant only small potatoes uncut, as should be done next year. The juices of the potato plant and its tubers are acrid, but being soluble in water, they are dissolved in boiling, their nature is also changed by heat, both in boiling and roasting, so that (like arrow-root, which is starch from the root of the acrid and poisonous Arum,) the potato, though acrid when raw, becomes innocuous and nutritious, by the action of heat. Potatoes, therefore, should "never be given to hogs or cattle raw". Liebig has shewn in his 'Organic Chemistry' that it is one function of the vegetable kingdom to prepare the elements of flesh and blood for the use of animals. The carbon or charcoal, which is indispensable to the act of breathing, but contributes little to muscle or bone, abounds in potatoes, rice, sago, sugar, brandy and beer, while the cereal grains of wheat, barley, rye, and oats, and seeds of leguminous plants, especially peas and beans, are loaded with the constituents of muscle and bone, ready prepared to form and maintain the muscular fibre of the body of animals eg; gluten, phosphorous, lime, magnesia, sulphur, &c. Hence, the rapid restoration of the shrunk muscle of the exhausted post-horse by a good feed of oats and beans. Hence the sturdy grow of the Scotch children on oat-cake and porridge and of broth made of the meal of parched or kiln dried peas, on this a man can live and do good work for three half-pence a day; while the children of the rich who are pampered on the finest wheat flour, (without the pollard or bran) and on sago, rice, butter and sugar, become fat and sleek and would often die, sometimes they do, from such non-nutritious food, but for the mixture of milk and eggs they eat in cakes and puddings. The best biscuits for children have an admixture of burnt bones, and the flour of beans is often mixed by bakers with that of wheat in bread, and (bating the fraud), the bread is better and more strengthening than if made entirely of wheat. Potatoes contain but little nutriment in proportion to their bulk, they are chiefly made of water and charcoal; so that an Irishman, living exclusively on potatoes, and eating daily 8lbs, would get more nourishment from 2 pounds of brown bread (which gives more strength than white bread) or from 2 pounds of oatmeal, and from less than 2lbs pounds of peas and beams; and as about 6 potatoes of middling size, go to a pound, an Irishman will eat daily 48 potatoes, and a family of seven, 336 potatoes. Hence the great value of the exuviae of an Irish hovel and its pig-sty, for the manuring of next year’s crop. Before potatoes were known, the food of the English peasantry and of soldiers was oatmeal, barley bread and peas. Sir W. Betham has found in Dublin, records of a vessel that was wrecked in the 15th century near Liverpool, loaded with peas from Ireland for the army in England. In Holinshead’s Chronicle we read this passage: "A large mouth in mine opinion, and not to eat peasen with ladies of time." Peas were then the food of ladies, and also of monasteries. Friar Tuck laid before his Prince, as his first dish, 'parched peas'. An old labourer at Axbridge complained to his master, Mr Symons (who died in 1844,) that labourers feeding on potatoes could not do now so good a day’s work as when he was young, and when they 'fed on peas." "Peas, sir" said he, "stick to the ribs." He uttered the very truths of organic chemistry. In Beans, we have vegetable "caseine," or the peculiar element of cheese. What is more restorative or more grateful to man, when fatigued by labour or a long walk? As we heat or toast it, it melts and ere it reaches our mouth, is drawn into strings of almost ready-made muscular fibre; and who has ever dined fully as not to have room left for little bit of cheese? Economic farmers should feed their growing, but not their fattening hogs, on beans and finish them on potatoes mixed with barley meal; their flesh is hard, and the fat not solid and melts in boiling, if fed to the last on beans. What is so restorative as beans to the jaded hack or the exhausted race horse. Sepoys on long voyages live 'exclusively' on peas. The working and healthy man and beast want muscle, and want not fat; fat incumbers and impedes activity, and every excess of it is disease. We seldom see a fat labourer or a fat soldier, except among the serjeants, who sometimes eat or drink too much. Landlords and brewers men get too fat on beer. Charcoal which, next to water, forms the chief ingredient in potatoes, is subsidiary to life, though not to strength. The same is true of the charcoal which is the main ingredient of rice, sago, starch, sugar, butter and fat. The woman at Tutbury, who pretended to fast for many days and weeks, sustained life secretly by sucking handkerchiefs charged with sugar or starch. During the manufacturers distress in Lancashire, five years ago, many of the poor remained in bed, covered with blankets, where warmth and the absence of exercise, lessened materially the need of food. When Sir John Franklin and his polar party travelled on snow nearly a fortnight without food, they felt no pain of hunger after the second day; they became lean and weak by severe exercise and cold, but sustained life by drinking warm water and sleeping in blankets with their feet round a fire; alas! a knowledge of such facts may become needful and useful in the approaching winter. I have stated that the cause of the potato disease was atmospheric, viz; quick and sudden changes from hot sunshine to cold and rain in August; this chilled and killed the leaves and stalks of one-third, sometimes, one-half the crop. Plants grown under the shelter of woods, trees, and bushes, escaped in fields, whereof the unsheltered plants suffered; the dying leaf and stalk was forthwith occupied by one of the many forms of microscopic fungi, which nature has provided to quicken the decay of all kinds of vegetables. One these (uredo segetum) forms smutt balls in wheat; a growth of black fungus changing the flour within the husk into a mass of microscopic mushrooms, or sporidia, mixed with fine fibres. Every one of these sporidia contains millions of small spawn or sporules; this smut has a bad smell which is washed off by water; and when mixed, as it sometimes must be, with bread, is innocuous. Good farmers steep their seed wheat in lime water, or sulphuric acid, to kill the spawn of this fungus that may be outside the grain. All kinds of uredo follow but do not cause disease or decay of vegetable matter. Each species of tree has its peculiar fungi which grow not on it while alive and healthy. A biscuit or loaf in a close damp closet, is in a few days, entirely changed into a mass of mould, ie; into millions of fungi; the same happens to mouldy cheese, and other dried animal substances. Exact accounts and figures of the wheat fungi were published by Sir J. Banks. Red snow is caused by a red species of uredo (U.nivasl) in the same family of fungi. The uredo of the potato is one of the prettiest little fungi in the world; Professor Pouchet traces it through four stages of decay, which end in putrid decomposition; 1 He finds brown granules on the membranous tissue which forms the starch-cells within the potato. 2. The tissue gets brown, the granules darker and more numerous and the membranes contract. 3. The granules get stiil darker and the membranes break up into rags. 4. The tissue is destroyed and reduced to fine granules. Throughout all these stages of decay of the tissue, the starch remains unchanged; it may be collected sweet and good, even from the putrid stage, if washed in three or four waters. "The Potato Rot is going on here," writes Mr. Josiah Parker from Devon, (Nov. 10) like a mill-race." It is going on also in Scotland and Ireland fearfully. Teena -- www.cotyrone.com http://lists.cotyrone.com/mailman/listinfo/ulsterancestry https://www.facebook.com/groups/CoTyroneIrelandGenealogy/
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