NATIVE WILD FLOWERS 



THOROUGHWORTS. 



There is a popular belief among many of our native 

 herbalists that for every disease that man is subject to 

 God in His mercy has provided a certain remedy in the 

 herbs of the field and trees of the forest; that there is a 

 sovereign virtue in roots and barks and leaves and flowers 

 if man will but search them out and test their qualities. 



The use of "simples," as the vegetable medicaments used 

 emphatically to be termed, has always found advocates in 

 the lower classes, especially amongst the humble country- 

 folk, who dread mineral medicines, with the nature of 

 which they are totally unacquainted preferring the herbs 

 of the field, which they see growing about them, to the 

 more costly "doctor's stuff," as they call the prescriptive 

 medicines of the physician. To the herb doctor they apply 

 with every confidence, entertaining no fear of the vegetable 

 poisons in which he often deals; in his skill they have 

 unlimited faith. 



Much of this kind of knowledge is possessed by the old 

 Canadian and the Yankee settlers, hardy pioneers who 

 emigrated from the United States at the close of the 

 Revolutionary War, induced by the promised reward of 

 certain grants of land in return for their professed or 

 actually proved attachment to the British Government. 

 These families, under the appellation of U. E. or United 

 Empire Loyalists, spread themselves along the then un- 

 broken forests on the shores of the St. Lawrence, and bore 

 hardships and privations of which there are few parallel 

 cases. 



Dwellers in the lonely leafy wilderness, with no road but 

 the rushing river or broad-spread sea-like lake, they lived 

 apart from their fellow -men; self-dependent, they relied 



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