he tubers, but they must have been rare. It appeared in Scotland with
the same symptoms as in Ireland. A contemporary account says: "In
various parts of Scotland the potatoes have suffered fearfully from the
blight. The leaves of the plant have, generally speaking, first been
affected, and then the root." From this mode of manifesting itself, the
potato disease was commonly called in Ireland, as in Scotland, the
Potato Blight. It had other names given to it; potato murrain, cholera
in the potato, and so on; but Potato Blight in Ireland, at least, was
and is its all but universal name. The whole stem soon became affected
after the blight had appeared on the leaves, more especially if the
weather was damp; and for some time before the period for digging out
the crop had arrived, the potato fields showed nothing but rank weeds,
with here and there the remains of withered-up stems--bleached skeletons
of the green healthy plants of some weeks before.

I have a vivid recollection of the blight as it appeared in the southern
portion of Kildare in 1850. The fifteenth of July in that year--St.
Swithin's day--was a day of clouds and lightning, of thunder and
terrific rain. It was one of those days that strike the timid with alarm
and terror: sometimes it was dark as twilight; sometimes a sudden
ghastly brightness was produced by the lightning. That the air was
charged with electricity to a most unusual extent was felt by everybody.
Those who had an intimate knowledge of the various potato blights from
'45 said, "This is the beginning of the blight." So it was. It is well
known that after the blight of '45 the potatoes in Ireland had scarcely
shown any blossom for some years, even those unaffected by the blight,
or affected by it only to a small extent; and the few exceptional
blossoms which appeared produced no seed. This feebleness of the plant
was gradually disappearing, and in 1850 it was remarked as a very
hopeful sign that the potatoes blossomed almost as of old. The crop
having been sown much earlier than was customary before '45, most of the
fields, on this memorable fifteenth of July, were rich with that
beautiful and striking sheet of blossom, which they show when the plant
is in vigorous health. Next day--a still, oppressive, sultry, electric
sort of day--I, in company with some others, visited various potato
fields. There was but one symptom that the blight had come; all the
blossoms were closed, even at mid-day: this w