JANUARY 3 



Egyptians of old, demand bricks without straw. How 

 can a man who has had little education and no experience 

 be expected to know about plants that come from all 

 parts of the world, and require individual treatment and 

 understanding to make them grow here at all ? Or how 

 can a cook be expected to dress vegetables when she has 

 never been taught how to do it ? In England her one 

 instruction has usually been to throw a large handful of 

 coarse soda into the water, with a view to making it soft 

 and keeping the colour of the vegetables, whereas, in fact, 

 she by so doing destroys their health-giving properties ; 

 and every housekeeper should see that it is not done. 

 Her next idea is to hand over the cooking of the 

 vegetables to a raw girl of a kitchen-maid, if she has one. 



I am most anxious that anybody who does not care 

 for old Herbals should pass over those catalogued in 

 March ; but, on the other hand, that those who are 

 interested in gardening should look through the Novem- 

 ber list of books, as they will find many modern ones 

 mentioned there which may be useful to them for 

 practical purposes. 



My hope and wish is that my reader will take me 

 by the hand ; for I do not reap, and I do not sow. I am 

 merely, like so many other women of the past and present, 

 a patient gleaner in the fields of knowledge, and absolutely 

 dependent on human sympathy in order to do anything 

 at all. I cannot explain too much that the object of my 

 book is to try to make everyone think for him or herself, 

 and at the same time to profit by the instruction which in 

 these days is so easy to get, and is all around us. Women 

 are still behind the other sex in the power of thinking 

 at all, much more so in the power of thinking of several 

 things at once. I hope the coming women may see the 

 great advantage of training their minds early in life to be 

 a practical denial of Swift's cynical assertion that ' mankind 



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