The guide may not be right about the strength to be had from tasting the roots and barks and buds of things, but I know that I am right when I tell you that the very sap of the summer woods will seem to mingle with your blood at the taste of the aromatic sassafras root, the spicy bark of the sweet birch and the biting bulb of the Indian turnip. Many of the perfumes, odors, resins, gums, saps, and nectars of the woods can be known to you only by sense of taste.
"But I shall bite into something poisonous," you say. Yes, you must look out for that, and you must take the pains this summer to learn the poisonous things of our woods and fields. So before you begin to browse and nibble, make a business of learning the deadly nightshade with its green or its red berries; the poison sumach with its _loose_ panicles or clusters of grayish-white berries; the three-leaved poison ivy or "ground oak" (which you can easily tell from the five-leaved Virginia creeper); and the deadly mushrooms with their _bulbous_ roots. These are the poisonous plants that you will meet with most frequently, but there are a few others, and it will be safest not to nibble any plant that is strange to you. Nor am I suggesting that you make a meal on the pitch of the pine trees or anything else. Do not _eat_ any of these things; taste them only. I was once made desperately ill by eating poke root (I was a very little child) which I took for sweet potato. Poke berries are not good to _eat_. Take along a few good sandwiches from home to eat. But learn to know the mints, the medicinal roots and barks, and that long list of old-fashioned "herbs" that our grandmothers hung from the garret rafters and made us take occasionally as "tea."
Finally, as a lover of the woods and wild life, you ought to take a personal responsibility for the preservation of the trees and woods in your neighborhood, and of the birds and beasts and other lowlier forms of wild life. Year by year the wild things are vanishing never to return to your woods, and never to be seen again by man. Do what you can to stop the hunting and ignorant killing of every sort. You ought to get and read "Our Vanishing Wild Life," by William T. Hornaday, and then join the growing host of us who, alarmed at the fearful increase of insect pests, and the loss to the beauty and interest of the out-of-doors through the extermination of wild life, are doing our best to save the wild things we still have and to increase their numbers.