Monsieur Eugene de Duren, in the Revue de l' Horticulture Beige, thinks that Europe ought to institute a potato centennial, as well as America have its centennial to commemorate the introduction of cotton. No more precious conquest for humanity was ever obtained over nature, he thinks, than that which planted the potato on European soil, and it was a conquest over human prejudice. Parmentier utterly failed to overcome the obstinacy of his French fellow-citizens against using the root, till it obtained the patronage of royalty. On the 25th of August, 1785, Parmentier offered King Louis XVI during a grand festival at the Tuileries a bunch of potato blossoms. The king placed some of the flowers in his buttonhole, and then ate some of the potatoes in the presence of all the court. Everybody ate them after the tubers had received this kingly blessing, and their culture rapidly spread through Europe. Mr. de Duren would therefore fix this day for the date of the centennial year.

It was of course known before this. They were known to have been planted in Belgium by Phil-lipe de Sivry in the sixteenth century, from some tubers in 1587, sent from Italy by the Pope's Legate, from roots introduced by John Carden from Peru in 1580. The English seem to have had their first roots through Sir Francis Drake, and Ireland received its plants through John Hawkins "on his return from Santa Fe" and by Richard Greenville from Virginia. It was 1580 when Sir Francis Drake landed in Plymouth, so that somewhere about that time will fix its introduction into England, 1580, the same year the English had them from Virginia. John Hawkins brought his in 1565, and Greenville in 1586.

Charles Lecluse - the Clusius of Botany - wrote in 1588, after receiving two tubers from Philip de Sivry from Belgium, "We eat them in Italy with pork in same way we do turnips," and, "it is very common on account of its fecundity in many German gardens." This note with a figure of the plant is the first mention in history. For all this the culture as an article of food does not seem to have made much general headway till a society of gardeners at Bruges, known as the confraternity of Saint Dorothy, took it in hand and made a free distribution everywhere of the tubers. This was in 1740. Dr. de Duren mentions also the names of Van Sterbeck, and Antoine Verlinest, as others to be everlastingly commemorated with those we have already named, in any honors to be given to the early introducers of the potato to Europe.