vi PREFACE 



knowledijce to be laid under contribution. Amono; medicinal 

 plants have been included the various herbs that are imported 

 or collected for the herbalist. Whilst the medicinal value 

 of a large number of these herbs must be regarded as very 

 doubtful, the fact that many of them are imported by the 

 ton suggests that, to many people at any rate, they rank as 

 medicinal plants, although their insertion in these pages is 

 a concession to their commercial rather than their intrinsic 

 value. 



A work descriptive of poisonous plants obviously calls for 

 no apology. It is justified from the point of view of personal 

 protection alone. When one realizes the awful things which 

 children attempt to masticate and swallow, the dissemination 

 of a knowledge of poisonous plants seems a necessity. Again, 

 even in these days, dabbling in herbs for curative purposes 

 is by no means uncommon, and to the eyes of those ignorant 

 of Botany several quite different plants appear to be identical. 

 This occasionally gives rise to serious mistakes. 



The diagrams have been drawn with a view to enabling the 

 student to identify the plant in the field by fixing attention 

 on the most outstanding features in its structure, or on some 

 marked peculiarity exhibited by the plant. Such helps are 

 invaluable in field work, and greatly facilitate the subsequent 

 process of finding the Natural Order to which any particular 

 plant belongs. 



An inclusion of all the plants that at one time or another 

 have been regarded as possessing medicinal properties would 

 embrace a very large number of plants that are now known 

 to be worthless, and so these are not mentioned. The scope 

 of the present work also does not allow of the treatment of 

 the medicinal or poisonous plants that are found among the 

 Cryptogams. 



It was deemed expedient to place under a separate chapter 

 all those poisonous and medicinal plants which grow as trees 

 or large shrubs, even though this necessitated grouping together 



