Ah but, strangely enough, we do find one great branch of the
race--the Teutons--unacquainted with the word _potato._ You may
argue that the French are too: but luckily, Science has the
seeing eye; Science is not to be cheated by appearances. The
French say _pomme de terre;_ but this is evidently only a
corruption--_potater, pomdeter_--twisted at some late period by
false analogy into _pomme de terre,_ ('apple of the earth'.) But
the Teuton has _kartoffel,_ utterly different; argal again, the
Teutons must have separated from the parent stem before the
Aryans had discovered that the thing was edible and worth naming.
They, therefore, were the first to leave Virginia: paddle their
own canoes off to far-away Deutschland before ever the mild
Hindoo set out for Hindustan, the Greek for Greece, or the
Anglo-Saxon for Anglo-Saxony. But even the Teutons have the word
_tobacco._ Come now, what a light we have here thrown on the
primitive civilization of our forefathers! They knew, it seems,
the virtures of the weed or ever they had boiled or fried a single
murphy; they smoked first, and only ate long afterwards: and
the Germans who led that first expedition out from the fatherland
of the race, must have gone with full tobacco-pouches and empty
lunch-bags. What a life-like picture rises before our eyes!
These first Aryans were a dreamy contemplative people; tobacco
was the main item in their lives, the very basis of their
civilization.--Then presently, after the Teutons had gone,
someone must have let his pipe go out for a few minutes--long
enought to discover that he was hungry, and that a fair green
plant was growing at his door, with a succulent tuber at the root
of it which one could EAT. Think of the joy, the wonder, of that
momentous discovery! Did he hide it away, lest others should be