Eringo is
curiously suggestive of 'Gringo,' which was the name of contempt applied
by the Spaniards to all foreigners, but especially Englishmen. The word
would seem to have been imported by the gentlemen-adventurers from the
Spanish Main, in the time of Good Queen Bess. If we take 'candied roots'
in association with 'kissing-comfits,' we are compelled to conclude that
Falstaff's potato was the 'batatas,' the sweet, fleshy roots of which
were described by Columbus to be 'not unlike chestnuts in taste.'

Certain it is that the potato was not regarded in this country as an
object of national importance until 1662, when the Royal Society advised
that it should be planted. In the history of the Society there is the
record of a recommendation of a committee, dated 1662, urging all the
Fellows who possessed land to plant potatoes, and persuade their friends
to do the same, 'in order to alleviate the distress that would accompany
a scarcity of food.'

In Scotland, the first mention of the potato occurs in the household
book of the Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth. From Chambers's
Traditions of Edinburgh we learn that the price in 1701 was half-a-crown
a peck. Robertson, of Irvine discovered what he thought the earliest
evidence of potatoes in Scotland in the household book of the Eglinton
family. The date of this entry, however, was 1733, and Robert Chambers
showed that the date in the Buccleuch book was thirty-two years earlier.

Further information is given by the Duke of Argyle in Scotland As It
Was, And As It Is. There we learn that, until long past the middle of
the eighteenth century, little or nothing was known of the potato in
Scotland, although in after years it brought about the most prodigious
effects on the population. The Celts of Ireland first began to use it as
an adjunct, and then as a main article of food. From them it passed over
to the Celts of the Hebrides, and was introduced into South Uist by
Macdonald of Clanranald in 1743. The Highlanders, always suspicious of
novelties, resisted the use of it for some years; and the neighbouring
island of Bernera was not reached until 1752. It was soon found,
however, that the tuber would grow luxuriantly almost anywhere--even on
sand, and shingle, and in bogs. It was quickly planted in those patches
of ditched-off land known in the Highlands as 'lazy beds'--a not
inappropriate term, which in Ireland is applied to patches of potatoes
not sown in drills.

In Irelan