138 FAMILIAR WILD FLO WEES. 



to us as food, and those which experience has taught 

 us are harmful. Two plants may grow in the same soil, 

 possibly in the same bed in the garden, and to the casual 

 glance they are so similar, that the undiscriminating think 

 them alike ; yet the one maybe a valuable herb for medicine 

 and food, and the other only a deleterious and noxious 

 weed. The plant now before us presents us with an 

 admirable illustration of this, for it is sufficiently like the 

 garden parsley for fatal mistakes to have arisen ; and 

 though its name implies that foolish people only would 

 make the mistake, the world will probably, school- 

 boards notwithstanding, have to reckon on a certain 

 percentage of such persons, and it becomes very much 

 the interest of those who might suffer by their folly to 

 enlighten them. Dwellers in the country who have to 

 deal with, a certain amount of rustic simplicity, which is 

 nevertheless sufficiently opinionated at times, will do well 

 to plant only the curled-leaved parsley in their gardens, as it is 

 then scarcely possible for mistakes to occur. Some of the old 

 herbalists classed the plant as a deadly species of parsley, but 

 for practical purposes we may point out the following dis- 

 tinctions : The leaves of the true parsley are of a much 

 more yellowish green; besides, the darker bluish green 

 leaves of the ^Kthusa are much more finely divided, and 

 have a gloss on them that we do not find in the pot-herb. 

 Again if we bruise the leaves of the true parsley we at 

 once get the strong but not disagreeable smell with which 

 most of us must be familiar, while the leaves of the fooPs 

 parsley have very little smell at all. When the stranger 

 has thrown up its flower-heads, the bearded clusters form 

 an invariable indication of its nature, but even the com- 

 parison we have drawn between the leaves alone should 



