52 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



MESCAL: A STUDY OF A DIVINE PLANT. 



By HAVELOCK ELLIS. 



MESCAL (Anhalonium Lewinii) belongs to the group of plants 

 which in various parts of the world have been intimately con- 

 nected with religion and have received the honors due to divine beings. 

 This group may indeed be said to be large, but mescal — on account of 

 the special appeal to the supernatural which its peculiar properties 

 make — belongs to the innermost circle of such plants. It is or has been 

 venerated by the Indians of many tribes over a very large region in 

 Northern, Central and Eastern Mexico, in New Mexico, in Texas and in 

 Indian Territory, each tribe having its own name for the plant — 

 mescal, hikori, peyote, kamaba, etc.* Botanically it is a cactus, 

 belonging to the special and little known group of the Melocacteae; 

 there are in the group some six or seven Anhalonia; they all grow in 

 inaccessible spots on high and rocky peaks, and have only in recent years 

 become known to science. The plant most nearly allied to the Anhalo- 

 nium Lewinii is the A. Williamsii, from which is obtained the alkaloid 

 pellotin, lately found of therapeutic value as a hypnotic. Mescal 

 buttons (as from their shape the dried tops of A. Lewinii are locally 

 known) are somewhat brittle discs some two or three centimeters in 

 diameter and partially covered by a hairy cushion. Lewin and Hen- 

 ning in 1885 first described this cactus and made experiments on ani- 

 mals with it, from which Lewin concluded that it is 'intensely 

 poisonous,' resembling strychnine in its action, and by its lethal action 

 standing apart from all other Cactece. This opinion probably rendered 

 investigators of mescal cautious, and little further progress was made 

 in our knowledge until 1894, when Mr. John Mooney, agent among the 

 Indians, who had read a paper on this subject before the Washington 

 Anthropological Society three years earlier, brought to the United 

 States Bureau of Ethnology a large supply of mescal buttons which were 

 entrusted to Professor Prentiss and Dr. Morgan, of Columbian Uni- 

 versity for physiological investigation. 



* I retain the name mescal by which the plant first became known. It has, 

 however, the disadvantage of being identical with the name of an intoxicating 

 drink, prepared from one or more species of Agave, with which it has no con- 

 nection whatever. 



