The Flora of New England - A Manual for the Identification of All Vascular Plants, Including Ferns and Fern Allies Growing Without Cultivation in New England #270117

How many other potentially valuable economic plants may be found in our own New England flora? The first step in any study towards this end must be the availability of good monographic and floristic treat ments the botanical foundation for sound phytochemical and pharmacological investigations. But as intriguing as possible discovery of new useful plants may be, we must never minimize nor for get the academic value of efforts like Seymour's Flora of New England: the understanding and appreciation of the vegetational cover of that part of the earth where we live and breathe. In these days of excessive emphasis on the practical, the importance of the approach and value of pure science is too often forgot ten. Perhaps it is here precisely that Seymour's labour of love offers its greatest contribution. As a botanist devoted to tropical floras, I find a curious parallel between the English plant explorer of the Amazon and Andes, Richard Spruce, and Frank Seymour. Both enthusiastic yet critical collectors, both compilers of floristic works they have in common an outlook which today is rare and refreshing. This outlook has been beautifully expressed by Spruce, a specialist in the bryophytes, yet who strikingly increased our knowledge of many tropical economic plants such as quinine and rubber, when he wrote: I like to look on plants as sentient beings, which live and enjoy their lives. When they are beaten to pulp or powder in the apothecary's mortar, they lose most of their interest for me. It is true that the Hepat icae have hardly as yet yielded any substance to man capable of stupefying him or of forcing his stomach to empty its contents, nor are they good for food: but if men cannot torture them to his uses or abuses.