“Well, ‘jimson’ is only a corruption of ‘Jamestown.’ When the early settlers landed at Jamestown they found so many new kinds of grain, and animals, and plants that they began trying them to see which were good and which were not. Among other things they thought the burs of the jimson weed—the poisonous thorn-apple of stramonium—looked rather inviting. So they boiled a lot of the burs and ate them. Like idiots, they didn’t confine the experiment to one man, or better still ‘try it on a dog,’ but set to work, a lot of them at once, to eat the stuff. It poisoned them, of course, and made a great sensation in Jamestown. So they named the plant the Jamestown weed.”
“I remember,” said Irv, “my grandfather telling me that when he was young, people thought tomatoes were poisonous, and he said it took a long time for those that tried them to teach other people better.”
“That’s what I had in my mind,” said Ed, “when I said that there was no known way to find out whether things were good to eat or not except by trying them, till modern science came to our aid.”
“How does modern science manage it?” asked Will.
“Well, if any new fruit or vegetable should turn up now, a chemist would analyze it to find out just what it was composed of. Then the doctors who make a study of such things would ‘try it on a dog,’ or more likely on a rabbit or guinea pig, to find out if it had any value as a medicine. They try every new substance in that way in fact, whether it is an original substance just discovered or some new compound. They even tried nitro-glycerine, and found it to be a very valuable medicine. So, too, they have got some of our most valuable drugs from coal oil, simply by trying them.”
“Good for modern science!” said Phil. “But, Ed, what were the other new things the colonists found in this country?”
“There were many. But those that have proved of most importance are corn, tobacco, tomatoes, watermelons, turkeys, Irish potatoes, and sweet potatoes.”
“Oh, come now,” said Irv, raising his head and resting it on his hand, “you said Irish potatoes.”
“And why not? They are a very important product, and the crop of them sells for many millions of—”
“But they didn’t originate in this country, did they? Weren’t they brought here from Ireland?”