Excerpt from The Indiana Weed Book "If I knew Only the herbs and simples of the wood, Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony, Blue-vetch and trillium, hawk weed, sassafras, Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew, And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods Draw untold juices from the common earth, Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply By sweet affinities to human flesh. Driving the foe and stablishing the friend - O, that were much, and I could be a part Of the round day, related to the sun And planted world, and full executor Of their imperfect functions. But these young scholars, who invade our hills, Bold as the engineer who fells the wood, And travelling often in the cut he makes, Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not. And all their botany is Latin names." - Emerson. "How ineffably vast and how hopelessly Infinite is the study of nature! If a mere dilletante observer like myself - a saunterer who gathers posies and chronicles butterflies by the wayside for the pure love of them - were to tell even all that he has noticed in passing of the manners and habits of a single weed - of its friends and its enemies, its bidden guests and its dreaded foes, its attractions and its defenses, its little life history and the wider life history of its race - he would fill a whole book up with what he knows about that one little neglected flower; and yet he would have found out after all but a small fraction of all that could be known about it, if all were ever knowable." - Grant Allen. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.