THE POTATO.

Otago Witness, Issue 3298, 30 May 1917, Page 10

THE POTATO.

We aro beginning to wake up to the fact that the potato is worth cultivating in quantities. The Central Empires are using the tubers not merely as an article of food but for industrial purposes—in the making of starch and spirit, for instance. Dr C. W. Saleeby writes as follows in the Daily Chronicle in regard to the wonderful potato: —"The most important lesson Germany has to teach us is the use of the potato. She is actually fighting this war on the potato. The extreme and extraordinary failure of last year's potato crop in Germany—by far the best stroke of fortune for the Allies hitherto—is the cause of her new-found love of humanity and peace. Long years ago she set to work to study this wonderful vegetable, for the production of the maximum of power through it. All our power comes from the sun through the soil and the green leaf. The power may be in the shoot, as in the grasses, or in the root, as in. beetroot and the potato. The yield of starch and sugar, incarnate, solar power, in these roots is enormous. Germany studied the breeding of the potato—what, in the case of man, wo call eugenics —and its nature. Year by year she made each acre yield heavier and more certain crops of this vegetable. She used it with the gross immorality that all the world knows. Potato starch, rapidly fermented into sugar and thence into alcohol, yields the potato spirit with which ourselves conniving, has long been killing nativo races. Alcohol similarly derived she is now using for the war, and as a source of motor-power. The damage done to the Rumanian oil wells only increases the im-

portance of this matter for Germany and fcr ourselves. "These are elementary facts of industrial alcohol, perfectly familiar to all who tako an interest in economic botany and industrial chernisry. Calamitous is our culers' ignorance of them. The matter has become even more urgent since I noted tho laughter caused in the House of Commons by tho announcement that the Minister of Munitions wanted potatoes for alcohol. ' No one who is responsible in any way for ruling Germany, or conducting the war there, could possibly have laughed at so familiar a commonplace. The Question is now, Can we quickly enough get alcohol for victory, and is tho potato to be beaten in this respect? "This wonderful plant oonturcs the sunlight, crams itself underground with starch, and there, in our hands, is power, which we may swallow, to make sugar for our muscles, or which we may change info alconol for any purpose wo please. Something like Nemesis will be achieved if wo can turn the German experience with tho potato for the destruction of African natives into tho means of victory for our nation."