Excerpt from A Manual of the Medical Botany of North America Botany is the science which treats of the vegetable kingdom. A science so comprehensive, including everything which relates to plants, from the life history of those low organisms on the border line between the animal and the vegetable world to that of the giant oak which endures for centuries, must of necessity be divided for the convenience of students. Accordingly general botany comprises many well-recognized departments one of which, devoted to the history of medicinal plants, is known as medical botany. But medical botany is also a comprehensive science, for the list of plants possessing greater 01 less medicinal activity is long, and the plants are, in many instances, so remote and inaccessible that their study is beset with many difficulties. The obstacles, however, in the way of the student who would acquire a knowledge of the medicinal plants of his own country are neither numerous nor formidable. Especially is this true of the medical botany of North America for though this continent, with its broad extent of territory, varied surface, and extremes of temperature, sup ports an extensive and interesting flora, the number of medicinal species is surprisingly small, and these are so distributed as to be generally accessible. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.