102 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN BULLETIN 
PLANTS OF OUR LOCAL FLORA WHICH HAVE BEEN 
USED BY MAN AS FOOD 
Plants have always formed one of the most important 
factors in the human diet, and the aborigines and early settlers 
of the American continent were often entirely dependent on 
the plants of their time for the maintenance of life. Some of 
the varieties of edible plants then known have since been 
replaced by improved and superior kinds and others are of 
no particular value except in an emergency. Many of our 
native food plants have not received the attention they 
deserve, and there are great possibilities remaining in the 
introduction and improvement of material for culinary 
purposes. 
The following quotation from an address by the late Dr. 
Asa Gray, before the American Pomological Society, in 1873, 
is interesting in this connection: 
‘Tt would be curious to speculate as to what our pomology 
would have been if the civilization from which it, and we our- 
selves, have sprung, had had its birthplace among the southern 
shores of our great lakes, the northern shores of the Gulf of 
Mexico and the intervening Mississippi, instead of the Levant, 
Mesopotamia, and the Nile, and our old world had been open 
to us as a new world, less than four hundred years old. 
‘*Seemingly we should not have as great a variety of choice 
fruits as we have now and they would mostly have been dif- 
ferent, but probably neither scanty nor poor. In grapes at 
least we should have been gainers. Our five or six available 
species, of which we are now first beginning to know the capa- 
bilities, would have given at least as many choice sorts and 
as wide a diversity as we now have of pears; while the pears 
would be a recent acquisition, somewhat as our American 
grapes now are. Our apples would have been developed from 
Pyrus coronaria, and might have equaled anything we 
actually possess from Pyrus Malus in flavor, though perhaps 
not in variety, if it be true, as Karl Koch supposes, that the 
apples of the orchards are from three or four species. At 
least one of our hawthorns, Crataegus tomentosa, in some 
varieties, bears a large and delicately flavored fruit evidently 
capable of increase in size; it might have been in the front 
rank of pomaceous fruits. In a smaller way our service berry 
would have been turned to good account; our plums would 
have been the progeny of the Chicasa, the beach plum, and 
