What made it particularly terrifying was its similarity to the mandrake，a plant that was thought to have come from Hell (地狱). What earned the plant its awful reputation was its roots which looked like a dried­up human body occupied by evil spirits. Though the tomato and the mandrake were quite different except that both had bright red or yellow fruit, the general population considered them one and the same, too terrible to touch.

　　Cautious Europeans long ignored the tomato, and until the early 1700s most_of_the_Western_people_continued_to_drag_their_feet. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well­known plant expert wrote that the most interesting part of an afternoon tea at her father's house had been the “introduction of this wonderful new fruit—or is it a vegetable？” As late as the twentieth century some writers still classed tomatoes with mandrakes as an “evil fruit”.

　　But in the end tomatoes carried the day.The hero of the tomato was an American named Robert Johnson, and when he was publicly going to eat the tomato in 1820，people journeyed for hundreds of miles to watch him drop dead. “What are you afraid of？” he shouted. “I'll show you fools that these things are good to eat！”Then he bit into the tomato.Some people fainted. But he survived and, according to a local story，set up a tomato­canning factory.

　　68. The tomato was shut out of the door of early Europeans mainly because ________.

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