NATIVE WILD FLOWERS 
THOROUGHWORTS. 
There is a popular belief among many of our native 
herbalists that for every disease that man igs 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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