Am.  Jour.  Pharm.  j 
March,  1918.  > 
Plant  Structures. 
167 
Listen !  Know  you  a  beef  or  a  sheep  or  an  animal  of  any  de- 
scription, that  could  have  been  what  it  is  but  for  the  food  it  eats? 
Know  you  any  creature  that,  either  in  the  first  or  the  last  analysis, 
lives  on  aught  but  plant  food?  Destroy  the  grass  of  the  field,  and 
the  fenced-in  cattle  die  of  starvation.  Destroy  the  nuts  and  the 
buds  and  roots  of  the  trees  of  the  wood,  and  the  squirrel  no  longer 
lives.  He  has  starved  to  death.  Destroy  the  creatures  that  live  on 
the  grass  and  the  corn  and  the  wheat  and  the  rye,  and  the  buds  and 
the  roots  and  the  fruits  of  the  trees  and  shrubs  and  plants,  annuals 
and  biennials,  and  humanity  not  only  disappears,  but  it  quickly 
disappears. 
Destroy  the  plankton  of  the  water  in  creek,  river  and  lake,  and 
the  minnow  dies.  Destroy  minnow  life,  and  no  big  fish  follows. 
Destroy  thus  the  big  fish  from  all  the  waters  of  the  world,  and 
human  life  in  immense  quantities  will  be  sacrificed. 
Then  let  those  who  propose  to  raise  high  the  banner  bespeaking 
man's  independence  of  nature  halt,  and  think  as  they  might  think. 
Let  them  credit  the  great  I  Am,  under  whatever  name  they  worship, 
or  whatever  creed  they  believe  it  best  for  them  to  acknowledge,  and 
give  thanks  to  the  great  Creator  of  it  all.  Let  one  and  all  unite  in 
accepting  that  the  first  step,  the  greatest  gift  that  has  been  given  to 
man  or  to  any  creature,  whatever  that  creature  may  be,  is  the  gift 
of  vegetation. 
Think  not  that  such  as  this  concerns  not  the  pharmacist  and  the 
physician.  As  one  who  for  many  years  has  been  delving  in  the 
helpless  struggle  to  attempt  to  comprehend  but  a  little  of  it  all, 
as  one  who  for  more  than  half  a  century  has  been  as 
"  An  infant  crying  in  the  night," 
I  speak.  As  one  who  sums  up  the  substance  of  the  lessons  that 
have  come  in  the  passing  decades,  may  I  not  ask,  Is  not  the  man  in 
medicine  as  dependent  on  vegetation  as  is  the  man  who  lives  on 
vegetation?  Are  not  the  most  valuable  of  all  the  remedies  that  in 
therapeutic  service  have  accomplished  from  the  days  of  the  dawn 
of  history,  been  either  vegetable  remedies  or  the  products  and  educts 
of  vegetation? 
Give  to  Mother  Earth  the  credit  of  so-called  inorganics,  on 
which,  perhaps,  a  carping  critic  might  say  vegetation  depends  for 
its  very  existence.  But  let  us  ask,  "  Before  these  so-called  inorganics 
take  their  part  in  life's  economy,  comes  not  the  vital  touch,  that 
