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Glencoe, Minn
directions. Its leaves, as you can see, are more or less like morning-glory and bindweed leaves. Its flowers are also like morning-glories, though they are not so pretty. It has a habit of storing up quantities of starch and sugar in its roots. It does this, hoping to use the starch and sugar again as food in forming new shoots. But sometimes we step in and disarrange all these fine plans, for we, too, need starch and sugar as food, and we take the big sweet roots and eat them.
People plant large fields of sweet potatoes, particularly in the South. So next time you eat a sweet potato, remember it is one kind of morningglory which has given it to you. The sweet potatoes are no relation whatever to our common potatoes; they do not belong to the same family.
The sweet potato is not the only useful morningglory. There is the jalap, though if you have ever made its acquaintance you may differ from me as to its value; for however useful it may be from the doctor's point of view, it certainly possesses properties which are quite the reverse of agreeable. It, too, forms large tubers, which it stores full of plant food, but it so happens that this particular plant food is not fit for human food. We put it to