ADDENDA 
‘¢Oh! Who can tell the hidden power of Herbes, 
And might of magic spel? ”—Sprnser. 
Or ANCIENT RECIPES AND OLp-WorLp CURES 
BY BLANCHE F. COLLIER 
(Reprinted by permission from “The Woman's Agricultural 
Times,” January 1905) 
I am a lover of old customs and practices of long past 
times. Freely I admit that they are often sadly unsuited 
to modern methods and manners. Of many it may be 
truly said that, though they had charm and uses too 
in the olden days, they would be quite hopelessly unfit 
and ridiculously inadequate if reinstated and generally 
accepted in the present day. Apart from that reasonable 
contention, it may be asked what temptation or what 
leisure have, for instance, our intellectual and highly- 
educated women of the twentieth century to cultivate 
such a study as that which was common to the house- 
wife of bygone centuries of the properties of herbs, 
their collection, classification, and the manufacture of 
numerous curative or store-house recipes, with the 
patient research and experiments as to the virtue of 
mixtures and decoctions for use in minor ailments. Nor 
can one expect that the wife and daughters of the 
county magnate or the country squire, or even of the 
ordinary gentry of the suburban districts, should go out 
into the fieldsand the highways and byways of the country- 
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