Identifier: birdsnature51907chic (find matches)
Title: Birds and nature
Year: 1900 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Birds Natural history
Publisher: Chicago, Ill. : A.W. Mumford, Publisher
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
r, though many miles apart and speaking in the faintest whisper. The early Greeks and Romans made extensive use of ginger as a spice and as a medicine. During the third century it was apparently a very costly spice, but during the eleventh century it became cheaper, owing to extensive cultivation, and was quite generally used in Europe. Dioscrides and Plinius maintained that this spice was derived chiefly from Arabia. The noted traveler and historian, Marco Polo (1280-1290) is said to have been the first European who saw the wild-growing plant in its home in India. As early as the thirteenth century a considerable number of varieties of ginger were under cultivation, which received distinctive names as Beledi, Colombino, Gebeli, Deli, etc., usually named after the country or locality from which it was obtained. At the present time Jamaica supplies the United States with nearly all of the ginger, and this island is, therefore, known as the land of ginger. Cochin-China and Africa also yield much ginger. 38
Text Appearing After Image:
22£ GINGER. COPYRIGHT 1900. BY A. W. MUMFORD, CHICAGO THE DOWNY WOODPECKER Qj Every leal was at rest, and I heard not a sound. Save a Wood-drummer tapping on a hollow beech tree. (^ HIS little Woodpecker is the smallest of all those inhabiting the United States. In the shade trees about houses and parks, and especially in orchards, he may be frequenty seen tapping or scratching on the limb of a tree within two or three yards distance, where he has discovered a decayed spot inhabited by wood-boring larvae or a colony of ants, his food consisting of ants, beetles, bugs, flies, caterpillars, spiders, and grasshoppers. The late Dr. Glover of the Department o fAgriculture, states that on one occasional Downy Woodpecker was observed by him making a number of small, rough-edged perforations in the bark of a young ash tree, and upon examination of the tree when the bird had flown, it was found that wherever the bark had been injured, the young larvae of a wood-eating beetle had been snugly coiled underneath an

Note About Images