A large number of the trees forming these forests are still unknown to science, and yet Indians, these practical botanists and zoologists, are well acquainted, not only with their external appearance, but also with their various properties. It would greatly contribute to the progress of science if a systematic record were made of all information thus scattered throughout the land; an encyclopedia of the woods, as it were, taken down from the tribes which inhabit them.

-Professor and Mrs Louis Agassiz
                                          (1868)