BY CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS
ALL the familiar vegetables and fruits of our kitchen gardens, as well as the cereals of our fields, were once wild plants; or, to put it more accurately, they are the descendants, improved by cultivation and selection, of ancestors as untamed in their way as the primitive men and women who first learned the secret of their nutritiousness. Many of these-as, for example, the potato, Indian corn, certain sorts of beans and squashes, and the tomato are of New World origin; and the purpose of this volume is to call attention to certain other useful plants, particularly those available as a source of human meat and drink, that are to-day growing wild in the woods, waters and open country of the United States. Though now largely neglected, many of these plants formed in past years an important element in the diet of the aborigines, who were vegetarians to a greater extent than is generally suspected, and whose patient investigation and in Genuity have opened the way to most that we know of the economic possibilities of our indigenous flora.
White explorers, hunters and settlers have also, at times, made use of many of these plants to advantage, though with the settlement of the country a return to the more familiar fruits and products of
civilization has naturally followed. Man ’s tendency to nurse a habit is nowhere more marked than in his stubborn indisposition to take up with new foods, if the first taste does not please, as frequently it does not; witness the slowness with which the tomato came into favor, and the Englishman’s continued indifference to maize for human consumption