deemed good food for horses when mixed with bran. In Slane itself, the
old custom, which was the chief cause of the famine of 1740, still
prevailed; for he says, the people there were not done taking up their
potatoes till Christmas. The potato culture, he elsewhere remarks, has
increased twenty-fold within the last twenty years, all the hogs in the
country being fattened on them. They were usually given to them
half-boiled. Wherever he went he almost invariably found the food of the
people, at least for nine months of the year, to be potatoes and milk,
excepting parts of Ulster, where they had oatbread, and sometimes flesh
meat. In the South, for the labourers of Sir Lucius O'Brien and their
families, consisting of two hundred and sixty-seven souls, the quantity
of potatoes planted, as appears from a paper given to him, was
forty-five acres and a quarter, ranging from a quarter of an acre to
four acres for each family. As to yield, the lowest he gives is forty
barrels per acre, Irish of course; and the highest reported to him was
at Castle Oliver, near Bruff, namely, one hundred and fifty barrels
(Bristol).[32] The average produce of the entire country he gives at
three hundred and twenty-eight bushels per acre--about sixty-six
barrels. "Yet, to gain this miserable produce," he says, "much old hay,
and nineteen-twentieths of all the dung in the kingdom is employed."
Potatoes grown on the coast were frequently sent to Dublin by sea; and
Lord Tyrone told Arthur Young at Curraghmore, that much of the potatoes
grown about Dungarvan were sent thither, together with birch-brooms. The
boats were said to be freighted with _fruit_ and _timber_!

Amongst the endless varieties of the potato which appeared from time to
time, that known as the "apple" was the best in quality, and stood its
ground the longest, having been a favourite for at least seventy or
eighty years. The produce recorded above as raised by Mr. Wynne Baker
was as we have seen from this species, what kind gave the still greater