The Ways of Nature

The study of edible and medicinal plants goes back to prehistoric times when man foraged for a living. A lot of it was done by hit or miss and many paid for their mistakes with their lives. The Roman emperors usually had slaves or servants who tasted their food to determine if it was poisoned. It is true that they feared assassinations, but they also practiced a lot of hit or miss food gathering techniques and many people died from experimentation. The Roman emperor Tiberius Caesar died of eating poisonous mushrooms due to this. I have developed a sort of Moh's scale for plant identification. In order to accurately identify a plant, several of its characteristic must be examined on a step by step basis. Many people are under the misapprehension that a plant can be identified from only one or two characteristics. This may occasionally be true, but it is not a good practice. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Ways of Nature