"Words of Wisdom" from Herbal Delights by Mrs C.F. Leyel (written in 1937)

Vegetation is the primary source of food for every form of life.

If the earth were not covered with its green growth it would be uninhabitable because the violence of the elements would reduce its surface to powder. Without the shade of trees, shrubs, and herbs, the earth would be a desert. The moisture absorbed by plant life is given out again and keeps the surface of the earth from getting parched. Plants bind the soil together and prevent tempests and floods from washing it away, as grasses bind the sand dunes on the sea-shore.

All living things from the highest to the lowest can be entirely maintained by this vegetation which appeared on the earth just before the creation of man. Vegetable life before that was strange and flowerless.

The vegetable world is man's natural food and man's natural medicine. It is the link between the animal and mineral kingdoms, as it absorbs mineral products and makes them easy for man to assimilate.

Even more important is the peculiar property of green plants to absorb carbon dioxide from the air by means of their green colouring matter, chlorophyll; in the light of the sun they not only breathe in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen, which is the precise opposite to the process of respiration by animals, but they combine carbon with oxygen and hydrogen and build them into carbohydrates, i.e. the various forms of sugars and starches that make food.

In fact it is the production of organic material from the air by green plants that makes animal life in this world possible, for animals possess no such powers.

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