Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lamarck) are best known for their edible tuberous roots. Though often considered a holiday food in North America, sweet potatoes are a staple in Africa and Andean South America, the plant's homeland. The plants were commonly cultivated since 2,500 BCE, although there is archaeological evidence that places early cultivation back as far as 8,000 BCE in Chilca Canyon in south coastal Peru. ("Archaeological Remains of Potato and Sweet Potato in Peru", Donald Ugent and Linda W. Peterson, Circular of the International Potato Center (Lima) 16 (3), 1988) In the past few years, sweet potatoes have joined ornamental gardening with the colorful varieties "Marguerite", "Blackie", and "Pink Frost" and the even newer "Sweet Caroline" series.

Sweet potatoes were introduced to Africa and Europe around the mid-1500s. Linnaeus named the plant, Convolvulus batatas, publishing it in Species Plantarum in 1753, but he also established the genus Ipomoea, five pages later in the same work. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck reclassified the sweet potato as an Ipomoea [ip o mee' a] forty years later (1793). (W3TROPICOS, Jim Solomon, Missouri Botanical Garden)

Although Lamarck's hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired traits as a means of evolution was off-target, he contributed much to the study of the natural sciences. Lamarck began his working life as a soldier. Injured, he left the army and became a bank clerk. Possibly bored silly, he studied botany and medicine and wrote Flore Française, a book on the plants of France. He spent years working as the assistant botanist at the Jardin des Plantes. After the French Revolution, he helped reorganize the garden into the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle and took on the task of organizing the natural history of worms and insects. Lamarck created the word, invertebrate, for those animals lacking vertebrae (backbone).

Lamarck was controversial. His life was marked by poverty, never earning enough to support his family with style. The last eleven years were spent without vision living in the care of his daughters. He died in late December 1829 and was given a pauper's funeral. His body was placed in a rented grave. Five years later, the lease was up, his bones disinterred. No one seems to know where his remains finally lay. ("Jean-Baptiste Lamarck", University of California, Berkeley, Museum of Paleontology)